Skyward Collapse

Collapse in a skyward fashion with Skyward Collapse.

In keeping with my theme of comparing games I review to other games, you ever play Civilization?  Well, in Civilization, or "Civ" in modern parlance, you create cities, build buildings, generate units, and try to take over the world.  Skyward Collapse is kind of like someone took Civ and just kind of ripped parts of it out at random, much like how Isaac "hacks" in Dead Space.  You see, in Skyward Collapse you still create cities, build buildings, and generate units.  The caveat is that you don't directly choose which units are generated or what they do.  As the crux of the game is to prevent two warring factions from destroying each other, this means carefully balancing both armies to be perpetually at war without making much progress.  It's kind of cruel, I guess, but you're also granting them resources and land using your god powers so it evens out.

So if the game is about preventing them from destroying each other, you're probably wondering why even bother building military buildings, right?  Well you see, during the Age of Man, AKA the beginning of each game, bandit keeps will randomly spawn.  Bandits pour out of keeps and go to great lengths to destroy all life.  You know, like real bandits.  Thus, the two main factions need a way to defend themselves.  Since you can't tell them not to murder each other, once the bandits are taken care of you're then left with two bored armies who very much hate one another.  It's all a balancing act.  If either faction gets wiped out it's game over.

Why do we scream at each other?

Now you're probably wondering, okay, why not just isolate both towns from the rest of the world?  After all, you're a god, right?  Make them into islands and let them live peaceful, isolationist lives.  That's all well and good during the Age of Man, sure.  But once turn 30 rolls around you enter the Age of Monsters and the game changes entirely.  The game now becomes a race to meet a quota of a certain amount of points by the end of the Age.  Fail to meet the quota and the game's over.  How do you get points?  Why, destroying units and buildings, of course.  Yes, every time a Red unit kills a Blue unit or vice versa you get points for it.  It doesn't make any sense but it's a great way to prevent this game from being Xenophobia Simulator 2013.

So your two nations are trying to kill one another, defend themselves from bandits, and amass resources.  Meanwhile you're trying to get them embroiled in a pointless but raging war that lasts until the game is over.  Not a whole lot like Civ any more.  What's even less like Civ is that there are no resources on the map or anything like that.  If a nation needs stone, you simply prestidigitate a quarry onto their land and bam, stone.  In this manner you have absolute control over who gets what, taking a lot of the luck factor out of the game which I very much appreciate.

But wait, did someone say luck?  I mentioned earlier that units can't be controlled.  They definitely have an agenda - to raze every last goddamn building that the enemy has - but they're, how shall I say, complete and utter morons.  Both nations will make efforts to destroy a bandit fortress, but they care more about fighting one another.  If red and blue meet at a fortress, they'll decide cleansing the land of the bandit scourge is for big idiots and start fighting one another in the middle of enemy territory.  It's rather annoying and makes very little sense, although so does the fact that these two empires with their infinite, divinely provided resources care so much about destroying one another.

Sunstone farm lookin' sunny.

A very major part of the game that sets it apart from others of its extended family is the fact that you can just toss out a mythological creature wherever you want.  Let's say it's Red's turn and Blue has a massive army about to siege their last town.  Good thing Red had a nice stockpile of incense because you can spend it to have a divine creature suddenly appear and cause many problems for Blue.  It's generally not a great idea to create too many mythological friends because once they're on the field they're here to stay and boy are they strong.  A single one can very easily take out an army, and once that's taken care of it's going to march its way straight toward the nearest enemy town.

Minotaur not gonna cut it?  Well good news, there's one step above magical monsters, and that's gods.  Gods are...strong.  Very, very strong.  The only thing that can reliably kill a god is another god.  Luckily gods just sit in the same spot until they get attacked or you tell them to do something.  For example, one of Greece's gods is Pan the satyr.  If you feel the need to send him somewhere you strongly dislike, plop his flute there and he'll mosey on over to it, destroying everything in his path.  Once he gets there he'll start playing the flute, causing all units of the other faction to drop what they're doing and dance dance dance the night away.

Clearly there's a lot going on here with many ways to deus ex machina the tide of the battle whenever you so choose.  It's all a bit daunting and confusing, but it's actually fairly easy to pick up due to the game's inherent simplicity in terms of actual gameplay.  Most of your turns are going to be spent either building some resources or doing nothing.  The game at large plays itself, and if you're a master of balancing you'll only need to intervene when the unexpected happens.  In this game, the unexpected happens a lot.

I actually expected to dislike this game at first because of how incredibly simple it was.  It still has its faults, but what appears to be a big piece of crap on the surface actually ends up being a very deep game that takes a lot of foresight to keep going.  My main gripe is how slow it is.  Units don't do a lot of damage and they take a very long time to build, so expect to pass a lot of turns while you yawn aggressively at your monitor.  This issue goes away once you're a good 40+ turns in, but that is a lot of turns.  It also really, really could benefit from well-implemented touch controls, but we're not getting any of that.  I had to rely on my good ol' horrible trackpad that I hate using.

Any game that disallows Meowth is automatically bad.

Current Price: $4.99
Verdict: Buy My Book

Five bucks is great.  As deep as this game is, you're not going to want to play it for hours on end because not a lot happens even at its most frantic.  It's the kind of game you can pick up and play for 45 minutes before you decide you want to do something else, like Everquest 2.  Still, you can expect to come back to it on a fairly regular basis provided you like turn based strategy games.  Were there some sort of scenario or goal to work toward I'd probably still be playing it, but nope.  Game 1 is the same as games 2 through a million, which is why this game isn't worth full price. I think they could have gotten away with ten dollars but they didn't.  Consider your wheel dealed.