Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire Review – These Jets Aren’t Made For Flying

If you’re in the mood for an exciting adventure on land and in the skies, Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire could be the game for you. Unfortunately, the sound premise is undermined by an execution that fails to deliver the thrills in most areas, when the potential was clearly there and the idea of a sprawling odyssey was at our reach. The memories and comparisons to Skies of Arcadia kept quite a few players eager, but the truth is that this airship didn’t take off and the result is a tiresome and unpolished work.

Great Premise, But…

Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire seems to have it all – a group of ragtag adventurers who will make their way through adversities to become legends, a world with quests to complete on foot, sections where you control your airship and enter turn-based aerial battles… It has all the ingredients for an epic adventure, and the beginning is exciting with a nice cutscene, the artwork of the characters shining and making us yearn to start controlling the hero and meet our fellow villagers.

But when the adventure begins, the contrast with the 3D characters and world is shocking, both featuring low detail and lots of emptiness, first impressions deflating as we go from what looked like a wonderful style to a very crude one.

This impression remains for most of the game’s mechanics – while aiming to be an homage to games of old, especially Skies of Arcadia, Sky Oceans ends up being a game stuck in the past, quite far from an update or an actual retro tribute to those years. In the end, it’s a game that didn’t keep up with the times, and doesn’t take full advantage of the technology available nowadays to deliver a polished, engaging, bug-free experience – you will find the exact opposite of these aspects in the game.

Exploring the often barren world is far from fun, with a succession of fetch quests that are straightforward and plain boring. While the story has some interesting beats, it doesn’t feel exciting enough to keep you pushing through the mild dialogues and uncharismatic NPCs. When you get into your plane and start cruising the skies, the feeling is not that exciting either. Controls don’t offer terrific sensations either in standard or simulation mode, and the camera can go regularly awry especially when you’re navigating tight spaces. The appeal in these sections isn’t much, apart from collecting some items and getting closer to enemies and sneak onto them to get an advantage at combat start.

When the turn-based combat begins, there’s room for some tactic opportunities, but even this is lost in some doubtful design decisions, the main one being that we can’t skip attack animations. Since even by fast-forwarding them (if you discover how to) these can last longer than the time it takes for the player to select an action and use it, we’re stuck waiting for them to finish as we watch each crew member doing their move. It ends up encouraging spam action selection and after a while you’re not really feeling invested in this succession of battles that drag on and on for much longer than they should. Each combat takes what seems to be long minutes, and it becomes tedious, something that doesn’t improve when you upgrade your airjets, as even this system is far from intuitive and more cumbersome than anything.

Going Down in Flames

Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire is the kind of unintentional retro homage where this homage itself seems to be something from the past. The cute character artwork is quite a clash with the ancient 3D world, and the tactical combat ends up being too lengthy and far from providing the excitement that these air battles could. There’s ambition for sure, and it seems like the developers are willing on improving the game, but it may be too late for that already. This is an experience that can’t be recommended as it’s clunky and not as enjoyable as the premise would suggest.

Score: 4.5/10

Pros:

• The artwork looks really cute and appealing
• The combination of three major gameplay styles had potential…

Cons:

• … But all of them feel clunky, monotonous, and overall flawed
• The 3D graphics truly look like being from the past
• Several bugs and issues

Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire review code was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.

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