Forever Skies

My first instinct with Forever Skies was to treat it the way I treat any new survival game: build a spreadsheet, plan a resource route, min-max the early grind. That instinct mostly holds, but the game keeps redirecting you toward something quieter. The loop here is scavenge, scan, craft, upgrade, repeat - and the airship sits at the centre of every single one of those verbs. From the opening tutorial tower, where you assemble a barely functional cockpit out of scrap metal and synthetic materials, to the point where you are piloting a multi-deck flying fortress fitted with hydroponic grow beds, a Metal Collector arm that magnetically hoovers debris out of the sky, automated turrets, and a research lab, the progression curve is coherent and satisfying. Unlike a lot of survival games where base-building and exploration fight each other for your time, here they are the same activity: your base goes wherever you go. The structural design deserves real credit. Rather than locking you into a fixed plot of land, Far From Home built an airship system where weight genuinely matters - you need to research and reverse-engineer technology upgrades before you can expand, otherwise the balloon simply cannot lift the load. That creates meaningful decisions about when to invest in new rooms versus new engines versus new turbines. The blueprint-unlock system, driven by a hand-scanner you aim at objects of interest across tower ruins and debris fields, feeds directly into a research-and-crafting chain that feels purposeful rather than arbitrary. Tower types are varied enough to stay interesting across the early and mid game - communication spires yield scrap and batteries, overgrown greenhouse towers offer food and biofuel, and the deeper Underdust zones below the toxic dust layer introduce oxygen management and actual combat as additional pressure systems. Speaking of the Underdust: descending below the cloud layer is genuinely tense in a way the surface-level exploration is not. The air is unbreathable up there and you are relying on a finite oxygen tank topped up by stations you have to repower yourself. Early areas are forgiving, but later sections add mutated fauna and the kind of combat that most reviewers correctly note is the game's weakest pillar. Enemies are functional rather than threatening, and the firearms and melee tools you unlock never feel like they carry real weight. If you came here for combat depth, you will leave disappointed. If you came here for the airship, the atmosphere, and the slow revelation of what happened to Earth, you will be in good shape. The survival meters - hunger, thirst, energy, immunity - are present but lean on the permissive side in normal difficulty. Veterans of Green Hell or Valheim will find them decorative rather than threatening, which cuts both ways: the pacing stays relaxed and exploration-first, but there is no deep food-buff or status-effect strategy to think about. The co-op mode supports up to four players and adds genuine social value to the shipbuilding, though it does put a mild cap on the creative freedom you have when building solo. Performance at launch was a documented issue, with frame drops in weather-heavy areas and occasional freezes when manipulating large airship builds, though Far From Home has shown consistent post-launch patch activity. The Steam review total sits at a "Mostly Positive" consensus across several thousand players, which is an honest reflection of a game that delivers strongly on its central premise while leaving several surrounding systems feeling underdeveloped. For the Subnautica or Raft crowd this is an easy recommendation with clear expectations attached: you are buying an exploration and base-building game dressed in survival clothing, not a hardcore survival sim. The airship is the game. Everything else is context. Come in knowing that and you will spend more hours than you planned watching the green-tinted sunrise from a half-built deck you designed yourself.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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