Very weird design choice and feels a bit amateurish in execution. One of the things I was really looking forward to, was the feeling of swimming around. It’s a very off-putting mechanic, at least it is for me.
You are essentially walking on the bottom, and can do a series of 3 (if I remember) jumps that semi keep you in the air for a bit. The “swimming” is very weird…well, that’s a bit misleading, as there is no swimming.
Read our update policy to learn more.Well…bought this, and played around with it a little bit, a couple of thoughts. This review was first published on November 21, 2014. Play through the story or try sandbox mode with everything unlocked.Use extractors to extract resources automatically from the ocean floor.Build an underwater base, weapons and equipment to extend your exploration range.Hunt a range of ocean fish for food and be hunted by sharks, barracuda and jellyfish.
Explore the ocean floor as you collect all of your submarine parts to return to the surface.A fact that is compounded further by the minimal number of items to build, lack of significant diversity in the randomised ocean layouts and straight forward enemy AI in particular keep it to a single playthrough adventure. While FarSky is a great survival game with a setting you wouldn’t have seen before the lack of depth and short loop keeps it from something you’ll play again and again like a Minecraft or a similar sandbox games. The map mechanic also serves an important secondary feature of tracking your co-ordinates and prevents you from getting lost amidst all the ocean valleys although it means losing that sense of wonder you get from exploration and uncovering new areas in other gamers. Enemies include sharks, jellyfish and barracuda who are attracted to rapid movements or blood left in the water from you hunting other sea creatures for food with your spear gun.
These extractors are a nice touch to the FarSky experience and will automatically extract resources for you when placed on a resource area which results in less manual resource collecting and important to maximise given how dangerous it can be in the water especially at night when enemies become more plentiful and aggressive. These resources once collected become new items to expand your base, weapons or even extractors that allow you to better harvest resources.
To help with the exploration side of gameplay FarSky is kind enough to provide a helpful map that will point out your submarine pieces and resource fields (such as coal or iron). Meanwhile oxygen supply is limited when leaving your home base of operations but can be upgraded through crafting over time. Hunger is satisfied by cooking fish that you hunt in the ocean or plants that you grow inside your base.
Managing the most important needs (namely hunger and oxygen) is key to long term success as you build out your underwater base and slowly upgrade your gear to extend your available exploration range. A sandbox mode which provides all the tools of FarSky offers and the freedom to use them as you see fit does somewhat help in this regard. When it is all said and done the expectation in FarSky is that each of these gameplay loops will take approximately 2 hours of game time which means you’ll want to replay the game a few times to maximise your price to content benefit. Along the way FarSky requires exploration, extraction, gathering, hunting, construction and crafting with a number of tools to utilise albeit not as expansive as more open ended sandbox orientated titles. Ultimately in this story mode you’ll be trying to find all the broken pieces of your submarine on the ocean floor in order to revive your sunken craft and ride back to the surface. While a shorter gameplay loop than other sandbox survival games the randomly generated maps are designed to encourage players to continually challenge themselves with a new adventure.ĭiving into the ocean depths players will find themselves with only the most basic resources from their crash submarine which means the odds and kilometres of ocean are against player survival.
Playing as Nathan FarSky challenges players to survive through exploration, crafting and building necessary structures on the ocean floor. Offering a short ocean themed survival game FarSky explores what would happen if your submarine crashing into the bottom of the ocean.