Skyhill is certainly an interesting game. It has a repetitive structure you would reasonably associate with survival roguelikes, and yet its design is full of unexpected highs and baffling lows, which altogether produce an average game that could've been much more.
Upon launch, Skyhill immediately greets you with an ugly polygonal 3D city panorama in the menu, which (thankfully) hasSkyhill is certainly an interesting game. It has a repetitive structure you would reasonably associate with survival roguelikes, and yet its design is full of unexpected highs and baffling lows, which altogether produce an average game that could've been much more.
Upon launch, Skyhill immediately greets you with an ugly polygonal 3D city panorama in the menu, which (thankfully) has nothing to do with any of the in-game graphics, which are in a pleasant cartoonish 2D style, and are pretty fluidly animated. The game then begins with a rather poorly drawn comic strip cutscene outlining the biohazard - and surprises you with the voice acting. It's not great, but it's present, and not only in the voiceover, but also in the audiologs you can occasionally find, which makes the game feel a lot more expensive than it really is.
The writing of these audiologs is quite disturbing and immersive, and same goes for the various kinds of notes (My favorite is probably "From the window, I see birds outside. If only I could be free as a bird! Free to fly, and free to eat! Yes, EAT!", though notes written from mutants' perspective are also cool.) Protagonists non-voiced thoughts (i.e. "I feel like this skyscraper will never end!") are also fitting. The 3 default endings are all poor, though; patched-in fourth one based on a fan's idea at least has more drama and more gameplay to it. Unfortunately, the immersion you get from the graphics, the story notes and the sound design (the few musical themes are very well-fitting, and many monsters have really disturbing heavy breathing sounds) is often undone by the gameplay and its contradictions.
First, the good. The game is turn-based, with any movement from room to room taking away a hunger point (and/or a health point if you're starving or poisoned), which gives you plenty of time to think. Stuff is randomly placed only once, at the start of the game. This means that the enemies do not respawn, and their dead bodies stay where they were, giving you the satisfying feeling of truly clearing that damned skyscraper. The crafting system is surprisingly large and can be really pleasant to operate. It's split into 5 categories: Weapons, Food, Health, Other, and Suite upgrades. Health and Other ones can all be done on the spot, while Weapons and Food crafting generally requires using workstation/kitchen back in Suite, and upgrading them via Suite upgrades to unlock better recipes. Once you do that once, you'll get so many weapons schemes and cooking recipes you'll feel like a trainee cook or weaponsmith. As for combat, it's simplistic, but serviceable, mainly due to the sounds and animations. It would've been great if the player had actual skills to use alongside the (only occasionally helpful) ability to target body parts, but at least the enemies sometimes do different attacks, one can run away to be encountered, wounded, later, another spits poison, etc.
The bad: Upgrading Suite any more after that is pointless, as you'll usually not get enough resources to craft Tier 3/4 weapons or food anyway. The resource placement is simply too random and not balanced well enough, given that there's no item regeneration to correct its mistakes. Crafting for each category always has a certain base resource that crops up in most high-level recipes (Cloth for "Other", Wood Planks and Scrap Metal for Weapons, Water for Food and Alcohol for Health), a resource that (with possible exception of Scrap Metal), simply doesn't crop up anywhere near often as required for them. Either the item spawn should've been weighted more towards these resources, or the crafting recipes should've been better at letting you use the kind of miscellaneous messes you'll generally end up with.
Either way, the game really should've had the ability to break unwanted item down. Believe, there's nothing more frustrating then finding many complete weapons in the lower-middle floors, long after you've crafted a superior Tier 2 one and have literally no use for them. You can't break down Saws to get their Scrap Metal, and neither can you get a Blade from Kitchen Knife. Actual recipes can be outright nonsensical too - crafting Gears requires combining Scrap Metal and Insulated Wires, with normal Wire somehow not good enough.
Then again, nothing harms immersion as much as the nature of crafting resources themselves. You're supposedly in a luxurious hotel, yet all that Scrap Metal and base foods would feel more at home in a multi-storey storage depot, or at least, in an explosion-dilapidated tower block. It's even more notable given that there's no paper money to be found, only occasional coins, which are roubles (even though character and hotel both appear American.) These are needed for vending machines, which can't just be smashed because...yeah.
So, on the whole, the game is rather average. It can be fun, but that depends on the kindness of RNG more often than on anything else.… Expand
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