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EFORB´s “The Skies” is an open world MMORPG that is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland environment, and the players are your worst enemies. In this game, there is no such thing as a safe place, any player can kill you on sight anywhere he wants including inside towns. The PvP system in this game doesn’t seem to have a limit at its current state. The death penalty received for dying is losing in-game currency and experience points, this when you know the game is designed for hardcore MMORPG gamers.

First death… swarmed by beetles.

There is a decent character customization where you get to choose from different type of heads, hair, eyes, etc. You can select parts of your body and stretch it or shrink it until the desired size is reached, which means there is plenty to play around with. As for your character’s stats, you get to choose to add points to strength, dexterity, endurance, intelligence, technology and luck. Each gives you different bonuses making you good at gathering resources, using a certain weapon or being excellent at dodging. These points you can gain them from leveling up your character while doing quests or killing enemies around the map.

The game starts as you wake up at your uncle’s house where your aunt’s tells you to go explore the world and find your brother. So that she can see him once more before she dies. And once you are done with the quests on what could be called a tutorial area. You set of to find your brother in the wastelands. In my opinion, this is a really basic story when it comes down a character’s background, which is something that regularly happens on many MMORPGs.

The character select screen.

The combat system in this game is somewhat similar to a 1st person shooter where you can choose to go with melee or long ranged combat. You can switch from 1st to 3rd person with the press of a key if you rather playing the game while being able to see around your character instead. The animations of your melee attacks don’t match the sound. And just hearing random swings as you attack, takes away the ability to know if you are being attacked while you are attacking a target.

It is hard to tell where you are being attacked from when fighting small enemies on melee combat.

The crafting system allows you to craft from foods, armors, weapons and drugs. The only downside of this crafting system is that it takes a long time to for your items to be crafted. And you can just craft one item at a time, but don’t let that worry you because you can at least continue to play around while the item is being crafted. There is a vehicle crafting feature in the game as well. However, it doesn’t seem to be in-game yet for nothing appears when I click on it. There is also a cash shop that sells ammunition and other crafting materials.

I have encountered many in-game bugs from enemies not dying as you keep hitting them. However, they’re still able hurt you and kill you (all while bartender Alex is floating on front of the bar counter). Another major bug I encountered was trying to get quests in town. As the mini-map would mark certain NPCs (non playable characters ) with an interrogation mark as in having a quest. Even so, whenever I talked to them for a quest, they didn’t have any quest to give me. Another situation was entering the sewers for a quest, whenever I tried to enter I would be stuck at the loading screen that would never end as in the content was missing. I hope most of these game breaking bugs are fixed by the time the game releases, because at its current state. The bugs make “The skies” unplayable for my standards.

Pros:
+ awesome graphics

Cons:
– It would be nice if the combat and sound animations make it feels like there are impacts on your attacks or shots.
– Crafting speed is too slow.
– There aren’t any indications of which level the enemies are in certain areas, and there isn´t any indication of the level of the enemies you are fighting against