Beyond A Steel Sky

Beyond a Steel Sky isn’t a perfect game, but it’s made with a lot of love and attention from the developer.

There's a solid adventure game in Beyond A Steel Sky. The puzzles make sense and ease newcomers to the genre, the story is mostly on point, and the writing is robust. Whether you're a longtime fan of the original or just coming to its world now, there's plenty to enjoy in Beyond. The multitude of technical gameplay and presentation issues make it difficult to eke out all of the joy you can from the title. If you can deal with all of that, then you'll find a fine adventure game to sink your teeth into. Otherwise, you might want to wait for a few patches to see if the issues get ironed out.

Quotation forthcoming.

Beyond a Steel Sky has some technical issues but it's excellent writing and interesting storytelling make it well worth experiencing.

Beyond a Steel Sky is a a worthy follow-up to the original game. Its story, characters, atmosphere and puzzles are truly enjoyable and its comic book visuals are totally fitting. It's just too bad that it doesn't feel well polished and that some people will, more than surely, have some headaches because it's sometimes really tough to know what the next objective is.

After 26 years, Beyond A Steel Sky is a strange yet welcome sequel. Not quite fresh enough to stand alone nor nostalgic enough to stir the memory, it nevertheless manages to thoroughly entertain if not thrill.

In many ways it is a worthy tribute to its predecessor, achieving it especially well in the most purely storyline face and in its modern graphic adventure mechanics thanks to the hacking system.

Tense and stylish adventure with entertaining, yet a little to easy solvable puzzles – but held back by a multitude of bugs and technical problems.

In the end, it falls beneath our expectations as often as it stretches beyond them. [Issue#349, p.96]

Beyond A Steel Sky has an enjoyable tale to tell that compliments the original game, building a newer, more modern dystopia atop the foundations of the Union City of old. It's just a shame that it's so rough around the edges.

Beyond a Steel Sky still comes off as rushed and sometimes disjointed, with more than a few rough edges. Right up until the final ten minutes I could swear I was only halfway through the game. It’s still worth the trip if you’re a fan of the original, but Beyond a Steel Sky’s flawed journey doesn’t go far enough to truly recommend.

All of my save files display playtimes that do not match up at all to how long I actually played the game. Often choosing to interact with a person or object would mean that Robert would turn around and walk away, very slowly, with control taken away from me until he reached an arbitrary destination. Textures frequently popped in late, lagging behind camera angle changes in cutscenes--the game is poorly optimized, which can impact its ability to sell the grandiosity of Union City.