When a developer or publisher claims a comparison to other popular games, it always triggers something in my brain and makes me a bit apprehensive, especially when it’s games that I enjoy. When I received SkyTime it was touted as SUPERHOT (which I freaking loved) meets Clustertruck. In reality, it’s more like Guts and Glory meets a pre-alpha version of Clustertruck. What do I mean by this? Well, read on and I’ll explain.

The game follows a scientist that loses his family in a freak accident. He does what any levelheaded intelligent person would and makes a time machine to go back and save them. This is played out via a somewhat generic stop motion comic and is narrated by the most monotone voice in history. The premise versus how the story is presented doesn’t flow well either, due to the simple fact that it’s never explained as to why jumping across vehicles, rooftops, and killing turrets plays into the loss of his family. The presentation doesn’t get much better as you progress, with menus and loading screens that look so bland it comes across as a student project.

The game’s worlds are pretty poor too, looking like extremely early beta gameplay of Bioshock Infinite with blocky, uninteresting buildings being the bulk of the assets. I’m perfectly fine with minimal visuals, such as those found in SUPERHOT, but when you include higher levels of detail in certain items opposed to others, the results come across as lazy opposed to a design choice. When you compare the visuals to the make up the hands and whatnot of the player (looking a lot like a Pip Boy from Fallout), it looks downright awful. Reducing the immersion further, if you happen to miss a jump, you simply fall into nothing, often times never registering that you failed and prompting the game to reload.

Even with subpar visuals, I’ve played plenty of games that still hit the right notes when it comes to the fun factor. This challenges you to work your way from start to finish as quickly as possible in a hybrid world of parkour and physics, using your stop watch to stop time, effectively using the momentum and slowed movement to make some pretty gnarly jumps. The problem is the courses are so poorly designed that you have to actually break the game to proceed in most cases. I’ve seen ramps that block you from gaining momentum, effectively being a brick wall, requiring you to think outside of the box using the game’s faults to make the jump. Invisible walls will be in the middle of the air between two buildings you clearly need to traverse, and we wish you the best of luck in destroying the indestructible turrets. The worst issue I experienced is the complete and utter loss of my wrench, which is needed to destroy the turrets that block your path forward. This tool has a handy feature where it will come back to you, much like Kratos’ axe from the newest God of War. The problem is it completely fails to come back to you as it should now and then, prompting you to reload the game and lose all progress on the challenge. All in all, the game is a broken mess with no overt redeeming factors.

The good news is that it is rather short, with only ten levels to complete. Each of these levels can be completed in just a few short minutes after figuring out a way to outmaneuver the game’s shoddy design. Since there are no mid-mission checkpoints (likely to inject longevity into an otherwise lacking game), failure gets old rather quickly, especially when it was no fault of your own. There is a bit of a variety with a number of the challenges having secondary objectives such as protecting a vehicle through the course, but due to all of the flaws and mishaps, these just come across as more frustrating than refreshing. If you find yourself sitting down in front of this game, you’ll likely see everything it has to offer in around an hour, if not less.

While Guts and Glory struck me as a game that was meant to be poorly made, I enjoyed my time with it, even with the technical aspects being an utter failure. SkyTime on the other hand feels like it has too serious of a premise and comes across as uneven, as if the developers aimed at creating a fun puzzle game in the vein of Portal, but missed the mark entirely. This means the only hope for the players is someone developing a time machine and stopping it from ever hitting the market.

1 out of 10

Pros

• It’s Short
• You Can Uninstall It Easily

Cons

• Literally Everything Else

SkyTime was developed by Alexey Khazov and published by Sometimes You. It is available on NS, PC, and PS4. The game was provided to us for review on PS4. If you’d like to see more of SkyTime, check out the game’s Steam page.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

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