Pilam Sky

My instinct when I see '2D action / strategy' on a micro-indie is to assume the strategy amounts to 'pick a direction on a menu'. Pilam Sky mostly earns the label, and that caught me off guard. The setup is a steampunk continent divided between three factions, the Chuns, Hussians, and Burmese, each with a distinct balloon design and a unique special attack. You pick a pilot, and from there the game opens into an airship hub that doubles as a progression system: thirteen rooms total, seven of which can be upgraded to level ten, all funded by coins you collect mid-battle. That loop, fight to earn, reinvest into the base, is thin by grand-strategy standards but coherent for what the game is. The strategic layer lives on the global map. Pirate forces are constantly pressuring kingdoms, and if their strength in any region hits the ceiling you lose the campaign. Battle victories slow the tide but the only hard counter is planting defensive towers, and towers cost time you could be spending elsewhere. That tension, build here or defend there, is a lightweight but genuine resource-allocation puzzle. It is not Crusader Kings. It is closer to a tower-defense meta wrapped around a 2D shooter, and within those limits the decision-making is honest. In combat you pilot your balloon in real time, clearing enemies and vacuuming up coins. The mode called Tyr flips things into a turret-defense scenario where you man a cannon on the ground and stop pirates from landing. A community member flagged early on that buying cannon shells can become an economy chokepoint when several enemies spawn at once, and that friction is real, especially in early campaign stages before your base rooms are upgraded. The boss fight at the pirate stronghold caps the campaign and functions as a reasonable difficulty check rather than a spike. The split-screen co-op is the most interesting selling point for a certain kind of player. Shared-screen local co-op is genuinely rare on PC, and Pilam Sky supports it alongside Remote Play Together, which extends the couch-co-op vibe to friends online. The review pool is small, just over fifty opinions, and the sentiment sits at roughly 80 percent positive. That is not a ringing endorsement but it is not a warning sign either, it is the honest score of a small game that does its specific thing competently. There are ten Steam achievements and the fastest recorded completion sits around ten hours, so content depth is limited. Where it falls short is straightforward: no mod support, no post-launch content updates visible in the forum, and the discussion board effectively went quiet after 2017. If you want a game that compounds in complexity over dozens of hours, this is not it. If you want a steampunk balloon shooter with a light strategic wrapper and a legitimate local co-op mode to share with someone on the same machine or over Remote Play, the value proposition is clear at this price tier.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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