Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire Review

Every now and then, a game comes along that really shapes what you think of games that come after it. GoldenEye 007 changed how we perceived shooters on consoles, Sonic the Hedgehog redefined how platformers could be, and Breath of the Wild reinvented what a Zelda game looked like. For me, Skies of Arcadia is up there as one of those genre-defining titles that changed what I would look for in a JRPG afterwards. So, it’s no surprise that when the trailer for Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire dropped, I was really excited. The main character looks exactly like Vyse, the style is meant to be an homage to the JRPGs of old, and the premise seems remarkably similar. The developers have never stated that the Dreamcast classic is an inspiration, but it would be an incredibly weird coincidence if it wasn’t. 

Much like how Larian suggested we shouldn’t compare other Western RPGs to Baldur’s Gate 3 though, it’s probably a bad idea to compare one title to another, especially one I wear such rose-tinted glasses for. But even though I have tried so hard to avoid comparisons, with a title that looks so similar, it’s hard to avoid them. This is a shame, because Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire just doesn’t stack up in comparison. I really wanted to love this game, but it pains me to say that I just haven’t been able to enjoy it like I wanted.

The first thing to get out of the way is that this is an indie title, so there was never going to be masses of long-form story content like you would expect from a AAA title. Whilst I’ve been careful to try and avoid expecting too much from a smaller title, the developers haven’t been quite so mindful of limitations. There is far too much crammed in, and there’s very little development; things skip from moment to moment without any chance to breathe, and new characters and mechanics are introduced at breakneck speed. This compression of such an ambitious story into a game that’s not long enough for it has the effect of making things feel a bit forced. You know that bit in Kitchen Nightmares where Gordon Ramsay chastises a restaurant for having a six-page-long menu and tells them to focus on making four or five dishes really well? Yeah, that’s what should have happened here. Whipping through scenes doesn’t give the characters room to grow, and I just didn't warm to any of them as you might expect to in this kind of game.

In stark contrast, the battle system is immensely slow, and frankly, quite cumbersome. Through much of the game, you find yourself facing enemies that can take down your characters in one or two shots, so the only way to proceed is to go all-guns-blazing with one character, and evade with the others, hoping that the enemy doesn’t roll better than you for turn order. It means that you end up only landing one or two hits per round, and it takes ages. The alternative, however, is usually getting stomped in two rounds. Now, you can speed up the combat, but that has a weird side effect of making all the sound effects in the game disappear. It’s very disorientating to be blowing up aircraft in absolute silence. At least the background music is very nice, and that keeps playing throughout. With boss battles taking over half an hour, though, it does get a bit repetitive. In the end, I muted the music and put the radio on instead.

This slowness also extends to more trivial battles, with one side-quest taking me the best part of an hour fighting menial enemies very slowly. There was no risk of dying in these encounters, they just took far too long. There are two kinds of fights: those where each of your characters is in their little personal ship, and those where each is taking a station on a larger ship. Unfortunately, they play out almost identically, and so the novelty isn’t there. For the larger ship, your characters don’t heal up outside of battle like the individual ships; This means that you’ll often be forced to fight smaller enemies with next-to-no health after a boss battle when you’re making your way back home. Many of these are scripted fights, too, which is such a bizarre choice. Reading through some of the Steam complaints about this, it seems like it’s not how the game is supposed to play out.

If it is indeed a bug that your ship doesn’t heal, that really wouldn’t surprise me. I found far too many bugs and awkward issues when playing Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire. There was an incredible amount of pop-ups (with entire buildings suddenly appearing out of nowhere), I got stuck inside bits of scenery persistently, and quite a few inventory items were named “no translation available”. One of the most unusual bugs, which I was warned about in the preview guide the publisher sent us, is the permanently stuck faces of the characters. I assumed that by the time of release this would be fixed, but we’re now a few weeks after release, and one of the characters still talks sadly about the death of his parents with a massive shit-eating grin on his face. It’s just immersion-breaking.

The controls for the game are awfully fiddly, with the camera moving far too fast on land and giving me motion sickness at the default settings. That same camera also has a habit of randomly swinging away from you, too, making it difficult to smoothly move your character. Fortunately though, when you take to the air in your ship, you’ll appreciate the ground movement much more, as that is much worse. The aerial movement is somewhere between a flight simulator, and those puzzles from the 1970s where you have to roll a blob of mercury around a maze. The lack of any heavy metal poisoning risk is, in fact, the only thing Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire has going for it over those toys! 

It’s such a shame that this isn’t a better game, as it’s clear a lot of work was put into trying to make Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire a real love letter to the genre. Unfortunately, this is the kind of love letter that I wrote as a teenage emo, rather than, say, a Shakespearean sonnet. There’s clearly the shell of a good game here, but it’s too overambitious and too underdeveloped to be fun, and all it ended up doing was making me want to go back and replay Skies of Arcadia. It brings me no pleasure to say that it was a chore to get through this game.