Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire review

Everyone has a favourite RPG of the past that fills them full of warm fuzzy feelings when they think of it, and for many people I know that game is Skies of Arcadia. Although I’m not someone with the strongest connection to this RPG classic, I must admit that any game that features sky pirates on an adventure in the clouds is fine by me. Despite being over twenty years old, very few games have tried to follow in Skies of Arcadia’s footsteps, or at least that was the case until Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire flew onto the scene.

Our hero Glenn Windwalker comes from a long line of skyship flying adventurers, but at a young age an accident saw his father vanish on a mission without a trace. Despite this Glenn still wants to continue in his father’s footsteps and fly around with his buddies, even though his mum still hasn’t recovered from this traumatic event. An unexpected incident forces Glenn to leave his island home and become a Sky Pirate sooner than anticipated, and with his skills and a bit of help he might just make the world a better place. It’s a charming story if not a particularly innovative one, and it gets you into some dogfights before too long.

Before you start gunning down flying monsters and rival pilots though, you’ll need to get used to flying around the world. You’d like to hope that flying an airship means freedom to set off in any direction and explore, but walls of dangerous currents make the environments feel more like a blue corridor than an aerial ocean. With a painfully slow turning speed, moving around is just uncomfortable and cumbersome, and after a few underwhelming minutes I was excited to get into a fight and enjoy a bit of plane combat instead.

Fighting enemies in Sky Ocean: Wings for Hire involves some standard turn-based combat, where you’ll need to choose your party members’ attacks and gun down the enemy before they turn you to scrap. The main issue with this, though, is that every single attack you make is followed by a massive animation of airships flying and shooting, which makes every turn take about five times longer than would be ideal. This is exacerbated by the fact that spending turns evading when you’re being targeted is key, and means every single combat encounter feels like a bit of a slog.

The speed of combat isn’t the only issue that dealing with enemies presents either, as your special abilities are also underwhelming. Firing off very slightly more powerful shots which add a tiny bit of damage over time just so rarely feels exciting and worthwhile, and means that for most enemies I just hammered the attack button in the hopes it would be over sooner. Sure, there are times when healing and dodging are essential too, but it takes way too long for combat to become more than just the same old attack exchanges.

Despite being a game that’s supposed to be all about the joy of soaring through the sky, it’s the ground where I ended up feeling most comfortable. Admittedly the time you spend on land is mainly just to explore towns and chat to locals, but the charming if a bit twee writing and likable characters are nice to spend a bit of time with. Your missions while exploring on foot do, however, often involve a fair bit of going back and forth between characters which isn’t ideal, but it’s still a decent break from combat and flying.

It may seem like I’ve been a bit hard on Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire, and there are some aspects of the game I like. The visuals are reminiscent of something like Megaman Legends with a bit of a glow up, both vibrant and colourful. The soundtrack is lovely too, and while a lack of voice acting is a bit disappointing, at least the tunes are good.

Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire is ultimately an RPG that just can’t hang with the heavy hitters that the genre keeps pumping out. The combat is slow and underwhelming, the exploration is frustrating thanks to clunky controls, and having to go back and forth doing fetch quests gets old fast. Those desperate for something Skies of Arcadia flavoured after a whole lot of waiting will likely just be a bit disappointed with this offering, and that makes it difficult to recommend.