Pros: Great PVP, great graphics, lots of schematics and items to build, easy to pick up and play, fun exploration
Cons: The odd graphical glitch here and there (Alpha), imbalanced teams in PVP (Alpha)
SkySaga, the free to play sandbox from developers Radiant Worlds, has just gone into another round of Alpha testing and we were fortunate enough to jump on the back of it to try the game out for the first time. It is, essentially, a Minecraft style sandbox where you are able to destroy the block built world using tools, build it back up and more with various resources, or craft items from them. However, with the far superior graphics, in depth MMO features such as area chat and questing, as well as other features, SkySaga definitely makes Minecraft seem outdated (though we’re not ragging on Minecraft, it’s a great game).
As we jumped into the world we got to make our character from 4 race types, monkey-men, lion-men, dragon-men and men... men... with some cosmetic customization options and then choosing what type of environment we wanted our home island to be. Crash landing on the floating island we were guided through the tutorial style quests and shown how to move, dig up blocks, craft some items and other thrilling stuff, the island is your own personal paradise to shape as you see fit; a slight step up from just having a single building.
The fun first came when we got to open our first portal.
Using some unique mined resources (which we thankfully had plenty of on our home island) we could craft a keystone that, when thrown into a huge stone structure, would open up a portal to a new area. These areas are randomly generated so you’ll never visit the exact same place twice; the landscape can be levelled, albeit they’re huge and it would take forever to do so, but essentially everything is destructible. Having a wander around we came across a castle that had some bad knights inside, fighting our way down into the depths, into the crypts, the knights became skeletons and little bit tougher…. so much that we got killed by a bunch of them… quite a few times.
Every time we died all our gear dropped on the floor, with the exception of our starter weapon (yay) and had to fight our way back through everything that had respawned to try and get it back, realising with each attack we made it was draining our stamina, then standing in the middle of the group of enemies not being able to hit. Doh. At the end of the dungeon crypt is a much stronger enemy, for us it was a huge skeleton with a massive shield who would block all our attacks, so we had to try and run around the back and attack, constantly flanking, which did feel a little clumsy (which might have been a little easier if we tweaked our mouse sensitivity). Dropping him gave us free access to a huge treasure chest with some decent loot and a portal back to our home island.
We also got to check out the main social hub/quest area City of First Light where we were introduced to the three main guilds, easy to find as their entire area is colour coordinated to match the guild; the Explorers Guild (green), the Settlers Guild (blue) and the Gladiators Guild (red). We could pick up a few quests from the main NPCs in each place and by completing them would increase our Guild points to increase our rank with each individual Guild, as well as picking up unique currency (again, for each individual guild) to buy stuff relevant to them. For the Explorers we were sent into portals to hunt down certain creatures, find landmarks and complete quest zones, generally PVE focused content that would turn up a lot of loot.
The Settlers helped us establish some of the necessary work stations on our home island and taught us new schematics and how to make stuff, which is pretty easy as you simply go to a recipe and then drag in the needed ingredients and start crafting. The helpful ingredient codex allowed us to check what items could be made from a resource once we had discovered the item, so there was also a fun element of trying to find new resources and work out how they could be used. One of the things we liked was when crafting at a station we could queue the number of items we’d want to make and the station itself would make them, leaving us to move on and do other things then come and pick the items up later.
Finally the Gladiator Guild, which focused on PVP and was a lot of fun. When queuing for PVP you can join a team deathmatch (kill the enemy team for points) or a Capture the Flag game. For our first game we joined and it was me and another guy versus a single player, it was pretty tough for him and he got smashed as we beat him 3 games to 1. However, when the next round started players can switch sides, and it allowed us to end up with a 3 v 1, to which the single player just quit and so the match was restarted. I decided to take it on the chin and queued on my own against the other 2. Running across rooftops from one castle to the other I finally reached the enemy flag only to find they had placed blocks all around it so that I couldn’t pick it up, the blocks seemed to be too high a quality for my measly starter pickaxe to break, and one of the guys defending it was dressed in some epic armor… that game didn’t last long.
Queuing again a little later and it was a good 10 v 10 match (max 15 people to a team). Taking what I’d learned I also focused on trying to hinder the enemy by building around our flag with blocks I’d taken from the area, in fact they were blocks from the stairs that I destroyed so that the enemy couldn’t get up there without building access! Once I started doing this everyone else seemed to get the idea and started following suit, bricking up doors to our building, making deep traps to try and catch enemy players in, even heading to the enemy base and trying to destroy it block by block whilst other people fought. The problem was that too many of our team started focusing on building, even the ones with much higher PVP gear than I, and not concentrating on getting the flag. The imbalance between level/gear of players is quite a problem, some players could nearly one shot us, but hopefully this is something that is only a problem for Alpha whilst the numbers are low.
The game is great fun and there’s not much at this stage we’d change. There’s a diverse choice of items to craft and your own island is a huge playground to build whatever you like and welcome your friends over to help out. PVE is fun and the dynamic content keeps it fresh and challenging. PVP was the biggest grab for us, being able to manipulate the environment made it a lot of fun and unlike anything we’d played before to that extent; with a dedicated clan you could really employ some interesting defenses and strategy.
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