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- Revolution Software
- Revolution Software
- Revolution Software
- Revolution Software
Beyond A Steel Sky
Released On: Jul 16, 2020
70
6.7
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Metascore
Mixed or Average
Based on 30 Critic Reviews
70
47% Positive
14 Reviews
14 Reviews
47% Mixed
14 Reviews
14 Reviews
3% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
Metascore
Mixed or Average
Based on 30 Critic Reviews
70
47% Positive
14 Reviews
14 Reviews
47% Mixed
14 Reviews
14 Reviews
3% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
I like how Robert Foster is an old-fashioned game hero with no inner demons to drown or who is operating in a trendy grey area where no one is neither good nor bad. In fact, Beyond a Steel Sky is in many ways respectful of genre traditions but with modern wisdom and presentation. The game can be enjoyed without prior knowledge of Beneath a Steel Sky but obviously, it has a lot of gentle nods to its predecessor. And unlike the original game that felt too short for me at the time, Beyond a Steel Sky has a good length to it with a well over dozen hours to see it through. During your stay in Union City, you will encounter some sensible and some crazy people, solve many tricky situations with a common sense and wit alike, bump into unexpected faces of the past, get your grumpy friend Joey back, visit the old cyberspace, uncover the truth beyond, erm, the steel sky, and leave some goodbyes along the way.
Unfortunately the game has a few logic issues of its own. A handful of bugs, including one that breaks the game and forces you to retreat to earlier saves, threatens the delicate relationship of trust that exists between player and designer, as each time you get stuck, you question whether the fault lies with your reasoning or simply a glitch. Patches will, no doubt, quickly fix the issues, at which point Beyond a Steel Sky will join its stablemates as a modern classic.
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 37 User Ratings
6.7
49% Positive
18 Ratings
18 Ratings
35% Mixed
13 Ratings
13 Ratings
16% Negative
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 37 User Ratings
6.7
49% Positive
18 Ratings
18 Ratings
35% Mixed
13 Ratings
13 Ratings
16% Negative
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
The story is good and the minigame it centers around is surprisingly fun and wide in scope. I haven't encountered any bugs.
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A fantastic adventure with some at-times brain bending puzzles that stays remarkably true to the original game. Some minor technical issues mar the experience slightly but it’s a great return for Foster and Joey.
Beyond a Steel Sky pays its particular tribute to the 1994 classic, while renewing and adapting its graphics and controls to the new times. Despite some minor flaws such as the conversational system, some somewhat crude facial animations or some occasional bug, the sequel does not disappoint. The return of Robert Foster is something that is appreciated and that suits the genre very well.
Beyond a Steel Sky is a a worthy follow-up to the original game. Its story, characters, atmosphere and puzzles are truly enjoyable and its comic book visuals are totally fitting. It's just too bad that it doesn't feel well polished and that some people will, more than surely, have some headaches because it's sometimes really tough to know what the next objective is.
In the end, it falls beneath our expectations as often as it stretches beyond them. [Issue#349, p.96]
A primitive adventure in all regards, complete with bad writing, poor puzzle design, and 10 years old graphics. It’s absolutely helpless.
I’ve no history with the original game from 1994, but this is a rich world with so much unexplored potential. The dialogue is kinda cheesy, but I was very impressed with the overall story. The way they implemented the scanner system to interact with holograms, droids, consoles, etc, was incredibly cool! I wished it were longer!
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PC
I often times don’t enjoy point and click games because they fall into certain stereotypes that I dislike. I figured that Beyond a Steel Sky could avoid those because it is a third person puzzle game rather than a standard point and click puzzle game. In some ways it does do better but in others it falls into the same traps. The ways it fails are that, just like in point and click games, many of the puzzles revolve around trying to combine items regardless of whether they appear to go together. I prefer if they make logical sense. The game at least tries to justify it with their hacking game. Basically you can search for devices in the immediate area and swap parts of one with another in order to get a device to do what you want it to. It is at least unique in the genre although they got it to be annoying by making many hacks time based. For instance I need to swap different speech commands from a device to a robot so I need to wait for the robot to be near, swap the speech to him and then go to another device and wait for the robot to be near and swap the speech to the second device. Often times I understood what the game wanted from me but I felt annoyed at having to keep waiting on NPC navigation to line up in order to do what I knew needed to be done. Other times I didn’t know what the game wanted at first. For instance why would I have thought to use a toaster to interface with a satellite dish ? I figured it out by doing to age old combine everything trope. One thing I will give the game credit for is their hint system. It has possibly the best hint system I have ever seen. It doesn’t outright tell you at first but gives enough detail for you to figure things out. It also has a cool down so you have to try to work things out before asking for more hints. The only downside is some of the puzzles not following logic which makes it needed more often then I would like. I must sound like I disliked the game but overall I didn’t. Some puzzles I will give it praise for are the Linc Space puzzles which I enjoyed. The story was also great. I thought I had guessed where it would go, then thought I must be wrong and was confirmed right all along. There are a good set of characters and good progression although the beginning has a pretty slow pace. The voice acting was superb all around. The graphics were a nice art style with a good use of colour although the hair detail could have been better.
I played Beyond a Steel Sky on Linux. It crashed on me once and froze once. There were 4 AA settings; a V-Sync toggle; an FOV slider that went from 80-110; and 9 other graphics options. You can skip cut scenes but not pause them. Alt-Tab worked. You could manually save although not during certain moments and there are 12 save slots to use. The game does auto save at various points as well. While the graphics have a nice style they don’t justify the performance of the game which often felt laggy. I don’t have exact frame rates to quantify it, just my feeling and the eye test. I did note that for the most part the game only used one CPU core and would often times peg my GPU at 100% usage. The graphical detail didn’t justify the GPU usage and the single CPU core being used was sloppy optimization. There were also several small technical blemishes such as characters chins going through their cloaks; droids walking through people during cut scenes; and certain textures being very dark during the reflections spa level.
Game Engine: Unreal
Game Version Played: 1.4.28330
Graphics API: Vulkan
Game Settings Used: All Highest at 1920x1080
GPU Usage: 39-100 %
VRAM Usage: 1506-4488 MB
CPU Usage: 1-21 %
RAM Usage: 2.4-3.8 GB
Overall the game is worth playing and has enough positives going for it that I enjoyed myself more than I was annoyed. The story is great and makes me forget about the various technical blemishes. I paid $23.99 CAD for it and would say $15-20 would be a better price point for it, certainly not worth the $40 CAD it currently goes for.
My Score: 7/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.1.5 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 21.1.0 | Mate 1.24.3 | Kernel 5.13.5-1-MANJARO
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TL;DR
Overall game tone, mood, and puzzles got more cartoonish/kid, a lot of dull uncanny valley characters, cheesy cliches, and bugs. All elements feel disconnected from each other. Lack of QA and lots of annoying bugs. I liked graphics, models, level design, and lightning, but it's not enough for a good game. Verdict - Didn’t like it, get it when it’s on 70% sale. If you are looking for a good, smart and stylish cyber-punk adventure, check out oldies or indies like The Red Strings Club
WHY?
Just to get the idea of how relevant is my review could be to your experience.
I’ve played the original “Beneath a Steel Sky” back in the 90s as a kid. It was not even a cd-version, it was a floppy version without voiceover and if I remember correctly, the PC my family had just a pc speaker instead of a fancy “sound blaster” card, so it was mainly just beeping and clicks as a sound.
I’ve replayed the original later though my life and played Broken Sword 1-4 from the same game development company “Revolution” as well as dozens of other quests, point-n-click, adventures, and whatever you call them games, including all the classics from Lucas Arts and Sierra of course.
When I found out about the sequel called “Beyond A Steel Sky”, I was very excited, as good cyber-punk never grows old on me. I knew that it was already available through Apple arcade, but decided to wait, as I didn’t want to be affiliated with Apple’s “new gaming service” in any way. Well, fast-forward to me buying the game when the sale started on Steam.
If you are not familiar with the original - then just a couple of words about the setting. The game is set in a dystopian future, the player assumes the role of Robert Foster, who was stranded in a wasteland known as "the Gap" as a child and adopted by a group of locals, gradually adjusting to his life in the wilderness. After many years, armed security officers arrive, killing the locals and taking Robert back to Union City. He escapes and soon uncovers the corruption which lies at the heart of society. The sequel takes place ten years later after Rob’s peaceful life is interrupted by violent events, that force him to return to Union City.
Visually game set me right on the mood for a good old adventure game with a nice “comic book” feel, reminding some sort of Telltale Games mixture with Borderlands. I was surprised by the camera and control style (which is not point-n-click apparently, but a 3rd person action gamepad style), which gave me the impression of more action inclined adventure style.
Through the first hour, I realized that it’s just a gimmick for a feel of “a familiar to contemporary AAA action” user experience, yeah you will have to walk around to find the needed characters and items, but no action per se of any sort. And by the way, physics for moving around is buggy - you going to be stuck in spots with plenty room, stuck into other characters, experience buggy pathfinding with your character doing a “moonwalk” while stuck in a coffee-table and similar stuff.
The more I was playing, the more I was getting disappointed. And there are reasons for that. Minor bugs in character behavior, camera, and sound were annoying and distracting from the story, and puzzles were way too linear and not thrilling.
As I got the middle of my 12-hour game (which would take less for a walkthrough - I would say I’ve spent 2 hours at least dealing with bugs, reloading savegames, and listening to needless dialogues) I realized that I’m not going to have a deep and fun experience, but decided to finish the game anyway.
At this point, I didn’t have any connection with the characters left, nor with the narrative. Most of the characters and the plot were very cliche for my taste, and occasional fun dialogues of Joey and Rob are lost in the massive spineless waves of non-essential and dull dialogues of non-essential and dull characters. At some point it felt like it was the developer’s goal to waste your time on these and long walks around, just to make sure that average gameplay time would hit a certain mark.
The game world is very beautiful but empty at the same time. It’s interesting to see the scenery once and basically, that’s it. Why choose the form factor of the open world and at the same time not introduce anything that will breathe in life into it is beyond my understanding. Technically you have dozens of NPC wandering around to imitate life, but with the fact that you can’t even talk with them (Hey, Little Big Adventure 2, an open-world 3d adventure from 1997 had more life in it) it just adds more to the uncanny valley.
Speaking about uncanny valley - unfortunately, the animation in the game is terrible, very crude and characters don’t even blink EVER. Feels like the animation style doesn’t work with the actual models/graphics at all, which brings me to a thought, that
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Cold 3D graphic reminding people of Borderlands, with generally dislikable characters, constant need to run after something to click on it, or to find where it went this time. Talk system could be done better as well, even with hints turned off, it felt like being guided by hand.
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PC
Summary A 3D adventure thriller, set in an AI-driven future. Subvert the world, hack the systems and solve the conspiracy to uncover the devastating truths.
Platforms:
- PC
- iOS (iPhone/iPad)
- Xbox One
- Nintendo Switch
- PlayStation 4
- Xbox Series X
- PlayStation 5
Initial Release Date: Jul 16, 2020
Developer:
- Revolution Software
Publisher: Revolution Software
Genres:
