Sky Ocean: Wings for Hire is a homage to JRPG classics with a Studio Ghibli inspired art style!

The premise you take the role of captain and unite a party of rag-tag sky pirates setting upon an unforgettable, touching journey, set in the open skies with adrenaline-filled turn-based dogfights.

The game boasts Stunning Studio Ghibli-inspired visuals, an array of unique characters to recruit, the choice to upgrade airships with new special abilities, and the potential to unlock new special moves.

Accessibility

With regards to accessibility, there is no options available beside very basic tweaks. There is even no subtitle options or controller mapping. So should you have hearing, motor or visual issues, this may not be the game for you.

Gameplay

Without a doubt its art style and tactical visuals is what drew me to this game. Each elements just oozed everything I wanted to play and so much more. The game begins with you’re a parents coming back from an expedition, except one doesn’t return. This event has a major impact on not only you but the whole community, and your mother who came back alone.

Fast forward many years and you are now at your graduation to become a fully fledged pilot like you parents before. Its at this point things take a drastic turn and in events I won’t spoil you are forced from your home town with only your pilot comrades, mechanic and your nan to rely on. Its here you quickly take on the new role of freelance pilots and start to build up a following.

Soon you acquire a large Airship which become a travelling home base, command center and attack vessel. You will use this to travel the semi open world map to engage in missions and quests to progress the overall story line. This beast is the only way for your group to travel long distances, and over time you will unlock more of the interior with each new crew member gained. During periods of travel you can attack or be attacked by other airships, which if you are victorious will allow you gain tech points which will allow you to unlock new attack skills for the ship.

It also becomes the only way to micromanage your fellow pilots, from their emotional, physical and dietary issues. Dietary options will provide you with specific buffs to your pilots, similar to how Monster Hunters World deal with its meals. Should a pilot get too stressed or hurt then you will need to ensure they are taken out of your roster to rest and recuperate. You will also be able to upgrade the main ships stats with purchases and as time moves on get to know each pilot better to improve your standing with them allowing for more stats buffs.

This also houses your crews Airjets, fighter planes to me and you, which are used for day to day missions and battles within specific locations. Similar to that of the Airship, each crews airships can be upgraded and unlock specific attack skills. Unlike the Airship, you will have to go to towns to buy upgrades, which as times moves on will change.

Missions are varied with some in towns collecting items or researching, to others being outside to find hidden clues, or take down particular enemies for coin. There is nothing new about them but overall does enough to keep the player engaged and intrigued. These do break up the battles you will face and gives the player time to decompress.

Combat is identical be it using your Airship or Airjets, with a small intro of the battle before starting on your tactical screen. Here you will be able to determine which enemy is targeting whom, yours and their health, and whom to target. Each round you have five options, Attack which is your basic gun damage, Art which houses your special attacks, Evade, to set your character to do evasive manoeuvres, Arsenal which houses buffs and healing items, and Retreat, which removed you from the battle all together.

You do this for every party member, and then press go to watch the battle unfold as RnG works out your damage taken/output based on the choices made. The keeps going until either of you retreat or are defeated, with then a experience and rewards screen popping up afterwards.

Battles do feel dynamic and whilst the tactical process is identical across the board, evaluating the enemies stats and utilising the ever increasing new skills against harder enemies, was thoroughly enjoyable. However, enemies I felt early on, had way too much health, with it often taking multiple turns of focus on a single target in order to take them down. Area effect attacks that hit multiple foes only are only unlocked fairly late in the game which again would have been helpful in the early stages. The blend of town exploration and air combat is a thrilling one, that will keep you entertained throughout your play through.

Graphics

As mentioned the game has a Studio Ghibli inspired art style, and even some superb animated cut-scenes that just ooze quality. However, it in this segment where the game seems to suffer the most in terms of bugs, issues and problems.

The low-poly aesthetics are bright and colourful with some visually lovely varied landscapes and some superb plane designs, that for me at least, are a jot to behold. But there are also some design choices that are weird, for instance none of the characters have any kind of facial animations what so ever. Going round the villages and towns everyone has a blank smiled expression that just feels unnerving.

Pop-in and frame tearing due to draw distances happen quite a bit, and in one instance a vendors items texture overlays spasm out with a rainbow effect that’s blinding when walking past. Camera angles when moving also create a vibration effect which also can be quite jarring when moving towards new npcs.

When it comes to the air combat every action from attacks, special moves and item usage, are delivered by stunning animations and a comic-style static 2D cutaways of your pilots in their cockpits. It also uses dynamic cameras for general turns and actions that give exaggerating movements in abid to showcase the intensity of a pitched aerial dogfight, which a usual turn-based tactical combat would not normally provide, and are a real joy to watch.

However again issues with the screen overlays appear with some elements never explained in their being. For instance there is a bar underneath the turn order, that sometimes has a colour gradient and a little meter pointing either left or right. During points of the battle it will say advantage or leverage, but never really explains what that means.

Some attack actions pause for long periods and in one instance with my AirShip, an attack actually crashed my game needing a full restart. When using the bigger Airship, after a combat, I’m often found against some wall of air against the edge of the map which then takes me about a minute to regain control of my vessel to allow me to progress exploring an area.

These and numerous others really hinder the player, like menu overlays not working or even text within vendors being hidden with not way to read them. Each are minor on their own, but in combination, stop the full enjoyment out of this game, which is a shame as there is plenty of fun to be had.

Sound

The game is partly voiced and often only provides repeatable statements during combat with the main story and npc interactions being told by text. The voice actors do a great job conveying their characters regardless and it’s a shame they weren’t allowed more to develop the feel of them.

In terms of the general sound, its fun enjoyable and does what is needed to make each of the areas come to life. What really works well though is the excellent music throughout, and especially during battles in particular. These soundtracks are varied and probably one of the few elements that I didn’t have issues with when I was playing.

My recommendation here would be a good quality headset to enjoy the upbeat gameplay sounds and music to its fullest.

Verdict

This leads me onto the rating of the game:-
Now I rate games in order of, avoid, on sale, great purchase and must own. My rating for Sky Ocean: Wings for Hire is a "on sale’’.

Whilst there indeed a lot of fun to be had, a large sway of glitches, game breaks and optimized performance issues really hampers this. This was a game that clearly needed abit more time before release and now will have to play catch up with a number of patches to ensure the best performance available.

The game is currently priced on Xbox at £19.99 or approx. $25 and depending on skill and patience would give you well over 25+ hours worth of gameplay. Once the story is complete however, the isn’t much to really re-engage you for another bout other than some side missions you may have missed.

I went into this with high hope that this would be the ideal light RPG to enjoy for many hours. So its annoying that the engaging fun, that really is addictive, is curtailed by immersion breaking issues. Hopefully patches and updates will continue to help this get to where it truly belongs.

Sky Ocean: Wings for Hire Review On Xbox