Poly Skies

Poly Skies is one of those games that can easily be overlooked, although I’d argue that it’s one of the most enjoyable ways to initiate players into the city builder genre. The game was designed with the goal of providing an easy and relaxing experience, and for that reason the mechanics are intentionally simplified. However, it can well appeal to more experienced players too, as a zen-like escapade from the micromanagement and over-optimization hell that even the blockbusters of the genre make one get used to.

Poly Skies is about creating little communities of people on floating islands. You build them houses, production buildings (arborist, mine, quarry, fishery), and fields to grow crops. You can expand to nearby islands by building portals for people to travel between, and each new island can thus become a cradle for a new village. At the end of each week, an airship arrives at your main island, and you can exchange the resources gathered for gold or new villagers. Later on, enemies will occasionally attack your houses if there is no defense building in their proximity. In a nutshell, Poly Skies does what you’d expect a city builder to do, but on a much, much smaller scale.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2944599344
For example, there are only 2 types of living quarters, 3 types of crops and only 1 type from each of the other production buildings. There is no production chain involved, and the production buildings have no customization options apart from the amount of people you want to allocate to them. Even though each villager has different values for their skills, there’s currently no way to choose which of them you want to work in a certain place - the game designates them automatically and the workplace will automatically raise the employees’ corresponding work skill (if one works at the fishery, their fishing skill will be improved). The buildings can be freely moved without any loss of materials, and without having to wait for them to be demolished. Demolishing a building is also instant, and you will get back all the materials you spent on building it. The islands you colonize will all contribute their resources to a global treasury, and the villagers will move freely between them to reach their homes and workplaces as long as there is a portal that they can use.

The economy doesn’t require any kind of optimization: there are plenty of resources, and they pile up very easily because the population consumes little amount of food compared to what you produce, and the buildings are overall very cheap to build. Thus the progression of the game is quite fast and dare I say effortless, allowing you to freely expand as you desire. There is a happiness system in place, but like pretty much all other mechanics of the game, it’s overly-simplified and very transparent (the exact parameters that influence this mechanic are unclear): during the day, the happiness decreases as people go to work, and at night it goes back up as long as they have enough food and some relaxation buildings accessible (campfire and a later-unlocked shrine).

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2944599460
The game doesn't have a tutorial, but it does have a quest sequence that guides you tightly though all the mechanics and teaches you how to play the game. In the beginning of the game, it’s advisable to follow them closely because even if you build things ahead of time, you’ll have to build them again when the quest requires you to do so (a quest that asks you to place a certain building will not autocomplete if you already placed that building before you received the quest). Aside from these quests, there are some lore fragments that you automatically collect by colonizing new islands, and gathering all five of them will award you an achievement.

However, as smooth as Poly Skies’s gameplay is, the game could use a few quality-of-life improvements. For one, there’s no autosave - if the game crashes, you lose all your progression (it does have a manual save though). Secondly, the UI is lacking the display of some stats: you can see how many villagers you have, but you can’t see how many free housing spots you have; you can see the amount of resources in storage, but you can’t see the amount you produce on a daily basis, from each type of resource; you can see the overall happiness score, but the happiness buildings don’t indicate how much they will increase it when built. Thirdly, there’s no way to quickly cycle through the inhabited islands - even if they’re easy to find since they’re close to each other, when you start expanding your empire and colonize many of them, it can become tedious to always scroll the map to find a specific island you’re looking for, even more so when you have your buildings under attack. And lastly, there are no notifications about new quests or new lore fragments collected - these are hidden under some panels that are always collapsed by default (and return to a collapsed state every time you press ESC to exit the building view) - this would all be fine for the purpose of keeping the game HUD uncluttered, if only there was a visual hint for the player to know when a quest is new or completed (the audio clue does not suffice). A lot of these issues will be addressed and implemented in future updates.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2944599391
Poly Skies is a very short game that can be finished in 2-3h if one limits themselves solely to obtaining all the achievements - which by the way, unlock naturally as you play and as you expand to having at least five islands populated. The game can surely be played for much longer than that, if one wants to. It also offers a creative mode in which all the buildings are unlocked from the start, but the achievements are disabled.

Poly Skies doesn’t bring anything revolutionary to the genre, but I love it for its simplicity and for how easy it is to handle. It does have its flaws, but they're rather minor in comparison to the deeply enjoyable and recreational experience that it provided overall.

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Go try the demo!

It’s a one man show, they are responding on the discord, and being up front in the patch notes about the game having a few areas for improvement and things that are still on the to do list.

I enjoyed the music, art style and the building process, so for that I’ll stick with it and hope they can make it really shine in the future once it’s polished a bit more.

ORIGINAL WITH IMAGES: https://www.neonlightsmedia.com/blog/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.