Shattered Skies Review

"Survival Shooter with Aliens"

Campaign

Shattered Skies is an open world survival game that mixes player vs player combat with some alien enemies thrown into the mix. The goal of the game is to largely just wander around looting any items that you can find lying around in the world. Think DayZ minus the long time travel and tactical strategy. Not to say this game doesn't include tactics when playing, it's just a lot more focused on fast paced shooting. I did find the combat to be enjoyable and many situations to be interesting, it'll be particularly great for groups that just want to hop into a survival match with less hassle in exploration. The map is quite large featuring a number of towns, cities and even small stops along the way.

Every area is filled with loot to collect with varying levels of rarity. You'll obviously want to grab some higher level loot if you come across any while breaking down anything for scrap as the game does feature a crafting system. It's a bit hard to get into as nothing is really explained aside from a brief video you can watch so you're mostly thrust into the battle. Aside from just walking about killing other players you can also engage in a special battle area, capture special spots or aim to take key events such as supply drops or packages. There's actually not a whole lot of depth to the game so if you want to play this it's purely for those pvp interactions.

Gameplay

I actually found that Shattered Skies looked rather nice with some solid graphics and thickly detailed environments. That being the dense forests filled with bushes and grass so that there was always cover to use. The cities open up a bit more and I was impressed with the depth for which you could move through buildings and the many vantage points available in the world. The guns were well done with various designs and rarity levels which provided a good selection when scavenging. There's also a selection of ammo types for various scenarios whether that's taking out people or aliens.

When it comes to the aliens I found them to be more irritating than an actual threat and I'm unsure they played a necessary part of the title. Combat is also action focused so you can jump from buildings with little damage taken or quickly heal in battle so not quite as tactical as other survival games where you need to set bones. The servers of the game are large hitting up to seventy players, but I haven't gotten into any that even hit half that mark thus far which isn't a bad thing. Despite the lower population I've seen I still run into plenty of players in the large world and many battles have taken place.

The Conclusion

Shattered Skies works well for those that want a quicker survival game that focuses on fun more than tactical travelling. There's loot everywhere so you'll always be stacked with items, but so will everyone else that you come across. The more adventurous folks will spend a bit more time looting special areas to come across rarer items, but general players can just hop into the fight. I was very disappointed with the alien aspect as I didn't find them challenging or exciting just being a small irritant while I was moving around. I did actually enjoy playing Shattered Skies as it's a fun survival game, I'm just not seeing a ton of depth to it. For some it might become boring quickly, but for others with a good group or those that like lone wolfing it out there then it works well. It also carries no microtransactions and free post-launch content so at this point there seems to be some good support for it.

Shattered Skies for PC
Review Code provided by Vim Global

Rating Overall: 7.2