Recent reviews by osmium

Been wanting to play this for absolutely ages.
I never got a chance to play Worlds Adrift back in the day, so when I saw Lost Skies being announced I got VERY excited.


I played this demo with a friend for about 12hrs and we had a loooot of fun. The gameplay was overall really fun and engaging to me. I didn't feel like any of it was grindy or annoying like you might expect with some other survival based games. I don't usually write reviews but this game felt worth posting about :)

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- The Traversal // Whilst it can be silly and a bit buggy at times, using both the base variants of the grapple/glider, as well as the upgraded ones felt amazing. The grappling system feels really responsive and intuitive so it didn't take long to hone in what it was capable of. Like how far I could swing, how much momentum was needed for jumps, and it's range. Adding the gliders to the grapple made for a unique experience and I didn't feel bothered by the fact that I might need to scale a mountain since it could be done so easily using these items.


- The Exploration // Exploring each and every island provided in the demo felt exciting and intriguing every time, each island felt like it had a different story to tell and different experiences to provide. Some felt more puzzle oriented, and others felt like I was rewarded with loot for just discovering beautiful sights. Combined with the game's art style, exploration was captivating and fun the whole way through.


- The Visuals // We've all seen floating islands in various fantasy-styled media before, but personally I don't think I've seen a game pull this concept off as well as Lost Skies. The volumetric clouds combined with the lighting system really elevates the already beautiful visuals. Every asset or creature feels like it was really well thought out as to how it would fit into it's environment and add to what's already there, it all falls together nicely to bring for some stunning images. Slight critique though, the game feels slightly washed out at times and could be fixed with a gamma tweak given that this option wasn't available in the Display settings. Otherwise though, massive props to the art team on this, genuinely impressed <3

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- The Airship Flying // I definitely understand that this is a demo and won't reflect the final product and that's totally okay. But I honestly struggled with the ship flying and I found it not only clunky but also overly complex. I've racked up 1.4k hours in War Thunder, and 1.6k in Elite Dangerous, both games with quite complicated flight models so I'm not exactly inexperienced when it comes to flying. Certain aspects of the flying such as ascending or turning bugged me because of the fact that any input that you would make with a button press would be maintained the whole way through. E.g. if I held Spacebar to ascend at maximum rate, that would be maintained and I would continue going up until I held CTRL to bring it back down to it's original value to cancel it out. This kind of system is absolutely acceptable but personally for me I found it difficult to manage all of the different ranges of movement constantly influencing the ship all at once.


- The Performance // Once again, absolutely okay seeing as this is just a demo. But I had a bit of difficulty playing at times because of the random frame drops or sudden freezes for elongated periods of time. The game tends to be a bit laggy at first and then slowly seems to warm up over time once it's loaded everything in, but once we'd left the main island and loaded in others, my game would hang for a while and crashed a few times. Nothing major here but just slightly intrusive at times :p