FarSky

Offering a short ocean themed survival game FarSky explores what would happen if your submarine crashing into the bottom of the ocean. Playing as Nathan FarSky challenges players to survive through exploration, crafting and building necessary structures on the ocean floor. While a shorter gameplay loop than other sandbox survival games the randomly generated maps are designed to encourage players to continually challenge themselves with a new adventure.

Diving into the ocean depths players will find themselves with only the most basic resources from their crash submarine which means the odds and kilometres of ocean are against player survival. Ultimately in this story mode you’ll be trying to find all the broken pieces of your submarine on the ocean floor in order to revive your sunken craft and ride back to the surface. Along the way FarSky requires exploration, extraction, gathering, hunting, construction and crafting with a number of tools to utilise albeit not as expansive as more open ended sandbox orientated titles.

When it is all said and done the expectation in FarSky is that each of these gameplay loops will take approximately 2 hours of game time which means you’ll want to replay the game a few times to maximise your price to content benefit. A sandbox mode which provides all the tools of FarSky offers and the freedom to use them as you see fit does somewhat help in this regard.

Managing the most important needs (namely hunger and oxygen) is key to long term success as you build out your underwater base and slowly upgrade your gear to extend your available exploration range. Hunger is satisfied by cooking fish that you hunt in the ocean or plants that you grow inside your base. Meanwhile oxygen supply is limited when leaving your home base of operations but can be upgraded through crafting over time.

To help with the exploration side of gameplay FarSky is kind enough to provide a helpful map that will point out your submarine pieces and resource fields (such as coal or iron). These resources once collected become new items to expand your base, weapons or even extractors that allow you to better harvest resources.

These extractors are a nice touch to the FarSky experience and will automatically extract resources for you when placed on a resource area which results in less manual resource collecting and important to maximise given how dangerous it can be in the water especially at night when enemies become more plentiful and aggressive. Enemies include sharks, jellyfish and barracuda who are attracted to rapid movements or blood left in the water from you hunting other sea creatures for food with your spear gun.

The map mechanic also serves an important secondary feature of tracking your co-ordinates and prevents you from getting lost amidst all the ocean valleys although it means losing that sense of wonder you get from exploration and uncovering new areas in other gamers.

While FarSky is a great survival game with a setting you wouldn’t have seen before the lack of depth and short loop keeps it from something you’ll play again and again like a Minecraft or a similar sandbox games. A fact that is compounded further by the minimal number of items to build, lack of significant diversity in the randomised ocean layouts and straight forward enemy AI in particular keep it to a single playthrough adventure.

Summary:

• Explore the ocean floor as you collect all of your submarine parts to return to the surface.
• Hunt a range of ocean fish for food and be hunted by sharks, barracuda and jellyfish.
• Build an underwater base, weapons and equipment to extend your exploration range.
• Use extractors to extract resources automatically from the ocean floor.
• Play through the story or try sandbox mode with everything unlocked.

Links:

• Buy FarSky (Steam)

Videos:

Review Platform: PC