Beyond a Steel Sky

« Beyond a Steel Sky reminds me a lot of the Telltale games, but better -- it has the writing, the plot drama, and the voice actor quality that made the older adventure games such a success, but with a modern engine, present-day graphics, and a full 3D camera that beats all Telltale offerings into a pulp. I was actually a bit surprised by how less serious BASS2 starts compared to the previous game, but it eventually evolves into a more significant tale as things are not what they seem and start to unravel, revealing their dark side. In the end, Beyond a Steel Sky is a surprisingly good adventure game -- which is no small feat in today’s industry -- and while different from BASS, it matches the original’s quality. If you’re a fan of old LucasArts titles, Telltale games, or one of the many people that waited 20 years for BASS2, this is definitely an adventure game you should get your hands on. »

« 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. »

« Filled with what made the original game great, this second trip to Union City has been worth the 26-year hiatus. »

« Beyond a Steel Sky is an excellent adventure game with a well-made narrative and a very inspired art direction. »

« 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 brings old school point-and-click adventure into the 21st century, with an action, and humour-packed plot, and a compelling sense of character. Puzzle-solving strikes that nice balance between satisfying, but not too complicated as to force the player to be bogged down at the expense of the story. The story itself at around 10-hours long or so, is a classic science-fiction adventure, and it hits all the right notes of action and emotion, despite Robert Foster not being exactly the most compelling character out there. While there are a few bugs and little niggles as far as movement animation being a bit stiff, these are cancelled out by what the game does well, which is in its high octane cinematic narrative quality. »

« It’s not a perfect game, but Beyond a Steel Sky is a perfectly joyful experience and a faithful sequel for anyone who loved the original game, while bearing the standard for what a modern science fiction adventure should look and sound like in 2020. »

« With Beyond a Steel Sky, Revolution Software, the team around Charles Cecil and comic book legend Dave Gibbons, has successfully transported the fascination of classic adventure games into modern days. Clever ideas, charming characters and witty dialogues make the sequel to „Beneath a Steel Sky“, which was released 26 years earlier, a must-play for every adventure fan. Hopefully we don’t need to wait that long for our next visit to Union City. It would be a shame. »

« I played this game for almost 4 hours, and that was more than enough to realize this kind of game isn’t for me. I wouldn’t give it more than a 4. If you enjoy running around searching for things and having variations of the same conversation, you’ll probably love it, but it’s definitely not for me. »

« The game is great I like the fact that there’s hints that really make the gameplay helpful but I personally enjoyed every aspect of it »

« 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. »

« The game is almost unplayable without a guide. Yes, it has well-written dialogues, but it doesn't provide you with enough guidance on our current goal or problem. You may need to get into the different parts of the city and do dozens of barely related tasks to complete the current set of problems. And it doesn't make sense even when you read it as a guide. »

« Beyond A Steel Sky is the sequel to classic cyberpunk science fiction point-and-click adventure game Beneath a Steel Sky, released on the Amiga in 1994. It has only taken 27 years to be made! So, it better be good. You play as Robert Foster, you live in a community in the desert wastelands, a child had been taken after a brutal attack, and it is your job to tracking them down and bring them home. You find yourself travelling to Union City, one of the last mega cities on the planet, a planet that has been ravaged from war and political strife. Union City is a seemingly perfect utopia, controlled by AI, everyone seems happy, everything seems wonderful, but with anything that seems so perfect, when you scratch beneath the surface, you find out that things are not at all what they seem. Instead of a 2-dimensional world, that the previous game lived in, the modern point and click adventures takes on a much more 3-dimensional appearance, and a feeling of more freedom with that. Beyond a Steel Sky is very much a cyberpunk thriller, but within the point and click genre, whereby you will have to solve puzzles, speak to people, find out what is really going on, and try to solve the abduction of a child. And while that is a very serious subject, the game does have a humorous side within its Cyberpunk world. One of the achievements you will want to get is to make a robotic butler fall over, to do this you need to hack into the laundry machine, and change some settings so that the water over flows. You then return to the butler, and ask him to do the laundry, follow him downstairs, stand back and enjoy the hilarity. Many of the puzzles will need you to hack machines, but often you will need to engage in a lot of dialog with people, to find out the information you need, sadly this can sometimes feel a bit tedious, when you just want to get on with the game, and not just listen to seemingly endless dialog. Early puzzles include helping people, who in turn reward you with things that will help you to solve the next puzzle. Similar in game mechanics to the Telltale games like Batman: The Enemy Within and Tales from the Borderlands, if you have played those games, you will instantly feel comfortable playing Beyond A Steel Sky. Although Beyond A Steel Sky does feel much grander in scale than those games. The Good The graphics are superb, everything looks and sounds great, and despite a few dodgy voice acting, overall, the acting and graphics are top quality. The game is easy to play, the puzzles are logical, and never too difficult. The Bad A relatively short game, and as mentioned earlier, some of the dialog can be a bit tedious. Overall If you are a fan of point and click adventures, or the Telltale series of games, then you will instantly fall in love with Beyond A Steel Sky, and feel right at home as you play, it is far from perfect, and a little short, but even so, it is a game you should consider adding to your collection. I score Beyond A Steel Sky a very strong 8/10 »

« 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 »

« -Good Story -Easy Gameplay -Nice Cartoon graphique (Walking Dead Episodes Like) -some little bugs not that bad -Fun »

« The story is good and the minigame it centers around is surprisingly fun and wide in scope. I haven't encountered any bugs. »