Poly Skies - Review

Well well, isn’t that nice, its the steam Base Builder fest and we are being treated with a release of a quint little cute-looking poly village builder and colony simulator.

But is it really as relaxing as it claims to be, or is it so rampant with bugs that you can hardly take in the peace without tearing out your hair? Let's find out!

Main Menu

The main menu is about what you'd expect; it has some soothing music, functional buttons, and a settings menu where you can tweak the game a bit to your taste and also take a look at the key binds. Everything is working here as far as I can see.

Into the relaxing world we go

Ah, nothing feels better than starting a new game in a base builder, everything is so fresh and new, just waiting for you to colonize the land ,to build civilization, and this game is no different.

The first thing you notice about the game is how relaxing it is. The music doesn't feel intimidating in any way, the graphics are neat and quite cute, and there is no sense of danger to be found anywhere. You start with 5 colonists, and your first task is to get them houses, a place for the trade ship to come every week, and some resource gathering buildings, no rocket science to say the least.

Sandcastles And Waves.

Now, let's be clear: This is a base building game, so if the building is poor, the entire game will fail.

But fortunately, the building feels good, there is a nice selection of buildings and cute little decorations that you can scatter about everywhere, without making it too complicated with too many resources for all buildings. In addition, you can do all the basics, rotate your buildings, destroy them, and move them; you have access to all the tools you need when to customize your colony.

Additionally, I enjoyed the challenge presented by each island's relative smallness, which required you to quickly expand to other islands. However, I did come across a few minor bugs when building in-game, which we will discuss next.

Mom, there is a tree growing inside of the kitchen.

Unfortunately, there are some bugs and some odd design choices that I'm not sure were done on purpose. For example, sometimes you won't be able to place down buildings on spots of grass surrounded by trees, even if there theoretically should be enough space.

This might just seem like a bad design decision but what makes me think this is part of a larger bug is that sometimes you can place buildings in the middle of mountains or rocks, or sometimes they even get teleported there when you're trying to place them.

On top of that I also had it happen a few times that when I selected a building, it just didn’t register, and I had to close the building menu and open it again before it would allow me to build.

Colony simulator?

If you believe the tags, this game is a colony simulator; however, the majority of it is just base building. Yes, you have to take care of people, but their emotions depend on the buildings that are available to them and whether you have actually fed them more than once since the game's beginning. As a result, there isn't much to say about this part of the game as it doesn't actually really exist.

Performance.

According to my personal experience, the game runs more than fine without any noticeable lag spikes or crashes, so it is well-optimized for the average Windows PC.

Conclusion

The game is a relaxing base builder, and that’s everything to be said about it.

It isn't revolutionary, doesn't have a wide variety of building options, isn't rampant with bugs, won't keep you entertained for hours on end, but it will help you unwind after a long, stressful day. It is bang average, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. For 7.50 euros, I really can't be too critical.

7.5/10

We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn’t impact our review in any way.