This will be my third bite of the cherry that is Forever Skies and if you’d like to follow my opinions throughout the Early Access period, I recommend you check out my preview write up here. If you’re coming into this for the first time, Forever Skies is the debut game from Polish developers Far From Home that has recently launched out of early access. They’ve taken the survival/crafting elements popularised by the likes of Subnautica, RUST, and Ark: Survival Evolved and put their own unique, high-flying spin on the formula. The 1.0 launch was bursting at the seams with new content that had been added since I last played, including four-player co-op, so I was excited to once again don my flight suit and make for the skies. Why, then, did I leave my time with Forever Skies feeling a little…deflated?
In classic fashion, you’ll start by crash landing on an unfamiliar Earth, one where nature has run rampant in humanity’s absence and turned our home into a barely recognisable mess of vines and crumbling infrastructure, all blanketed by a thick, toxic fog. After you get your bearings and briefly learn how to survive in this dangerous new world, you’re tasked with finding a cure for the virus that permeates your body and threatens not only your life, but the lives of all your fellow humans in the space station orbiting above. While that would be impossible to do in the rusty shell of a skyscraper you woke up in, thankfully, you’re swiftly handed the reigns of a tiny airship, one that you must fix up and build into your own state-of-the-art flying laboratory. The sky is no longer the limit in your dirigible and it’s now up to you to pilfer and repurpose the materials found at the various points of interest you can see on the horizon, uncover the mysteries of the virus and eventually venture down below the layer of dust to the ruins of the old world. Though I’d gotten a glimpse of the narrative in my earlier preview of Forever Skies, it was great to finally experience the whole story in my 20+ hour playthrough.
“It gets bigger, I swear”
If you’ve read this far, chances are you’re familiar with how these kinds of games play. You’ll use your tools to break down resources in the world and then use them to research and craft all new equipment to help you survive longer, traverse the world more easily and progress the story. As mentioned above, the main difference with Forever Skies is the mobile nature of the airship. No longer do you have to worry about perfect base placement, because your base now travels and grows alongside you. When I was playing solo, there was a certain companionship I forged with my airship, taking pride in seeing it expand and feeling genuinely bad when I’d steered us too close to a radio tower and bumped against it. Although maintaining your hunger, thirst and energy levels will no doubt be front of mind for most of your playthrough (with several options to tweak if it’s not your jam), there are also other dangers that lurk in the world, which you’ll need to fight in order to stay alive. Unfortunately, the fairly weak combat system is just one of a few issues that I felt weighing down my experience.
I don’t want to sound too harsh, I did mostly enjoy my time with Forever Skies and to be honest I probably went into it with fairly high expectations. That being said, I do feel a bit like the ambition and scope of the developers may have outpaced their ability to deliver it within the time available. As mentioned above, the combat feels bad, to the point where I just avoided areas altogether if it meant I had to fight something. If you do get dragged into a tussle by the enemy AI who can apparently detect you from a mile off and launch blasts of acid at you, you’ll need to either use your crossbow that takes ages to reload or run right up into their face and hit them with your tiny knife. If they do hit you, they’ll likely infect you with one of several viruses in the game that burden you with negative effects, which you can either wait out or manufacture a cure for. Speaking of crafting, that was another mechanic that I found needlessly obtuse and unsatisfying during my playthrough, again leading to me only engaging with it when I absolutely had to. This was surprising given that it’s one of the pillars of these types of games and is usually one my most enjoyable time sinks. Unlocking recipes, researching and crafting tables, highly specific resource needs, hell even resource stack limits all felt like I was playing another EARLY, early access build, before they’d tuned things to improve the player experience. Performance was also a bit of an issue at times, with element pop-ins as I flew around and severe stuttering when transitioning between the skies and the ‘Underdust’ levels.
This version of the apocalypse IS quite beautiful
By far the biggest let down of Forever Skies though was the diversity in the locations, or rather the lack thereof. Jumping into my airship for the first time and gazing out at the horizon seemed to promise a vast world of unexplored wastes to plunder, but in reality there’s only a handful unique landing zones that, once visited, appear again and again with only minor variations. For example, upon landing at a radio tower, you’ll find a shack or two with some resources and data pad. After a short flight, you’ll see another radio tower, that is laid out exactly the same, but maybe this time there is only one shack, or maybe it has a lot of glass walls instead of metal walls etc. Even changing biomes does very little to shake up the location diversity, with end game radio towers just being more covered in vines or hosting a few more nasties. There are some unique story locations that are interesting to explore once you reach them, but unless I desperately needed a particular resource from a location (like copper from a windfarm) I usually completely avoided them. Strangely, I found one landing zone in the late game that was totally unlike any other I’d encountered so far in my journey, but bizarrely although it looked important, it was completely devoid of any resources, recipes or storytelling devices. The lack of diversity is definitely not a deal-breaker for me, but it does feel like wasted potential.
I did manage to play a little bit of Forever Skies as part of a three-player party, but once I was booted from that I found it very difficult to find a session and hosting one remained fruitless for hours. I don’t know if that’s due to an error in the matchmaking or if there are just not enough people playing this in co-op to fill out numbers. If you can wrangle a few mates to play it though, I suspect that will be the more enjoyable way to play, as there will be more reason to build out your airship.
Man vs Mantis
Final Thoughts
I really wanted to love Forever Skies and I’d hoped that it would recapture the magic I felt when playing Subnautica for the first time. The foibles that I’d been prepared to overlook during Early Access became disappointing features in the final release and to be honest, I walked away wishing that the developer had taken more time to polish the experience. It’s been working hard to squash bugs since release and has promised a content roadmap going forward, so by the time you read this some of the issues I’ve outlined may be addressed. All in all, I did actually enjoy my time with Forever Skies and I recommend checking it out if you like these kinds of games, just don’t do what I did – and temper your expectations going in.
Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher
- Far From Home
- Far From Home
- PS5 / PC
- April 15, 2025
