Widower's Sky 9+

Needs a lot of work

For being a $5 game there are far too many problems. It looked interesting but once you launch the game some things become clear. This game destroys your battery within 30 minutes. The “tutorial” is poorly designed you have to figure out how to do things by yourself. The controls are very bad and all of the AI is badly designed. In the first level enemies which can one shot you see you from very far away on a very small island and they can shoot through anything and all of the things you need to get to in able to progress are within range of them. The attacking is bad. Looking around and moving needs to be improved. It looks like it could be a really cool game but upon launch so much is wrong with it i don't hold out much hope.

Too soon to tell. Needs a tutorial.

Update: Tried to play for another hour.
- Son seems to need food at the most annoying times, and the whimpering is annoying, not endearing.
- I seem to have to restart a level to find deer if I already killed one, and while it only takes one bowl of food out of several to feed the kid, you will eat them all to no benefit if you walk through them.
- Landscape is pretty, until it becomes annoying when random trees or objects block your view.
- still no clue what the objective is. I found some buttons to press and blocks to carry but the landscape has so many random things it’s a frustrating walk between items to see if they:
A - pop up and shoot you
B - do nothing.
C - reveal a button.

Also annoying, things can shoot you from above but you can only shoot perpendicular to what would be ground level. No angle shots.

——

First time I fired it up on a current gen iPad Pro, it didn’t give me the on-screen controls despite being set to touch. I will be charging up my game pad because the on-screen controls after showing up on the third restart, aren’t that intuitive. The toggling of what the main right button does using smaller icons is a weird setup.
Objectives are vague and between being shot to sleep by a laser turret, a weird ball on legs, and chased to sleep by a bear (you don’t seem to ever “die”), it’s a hard start without a tutorial. I have killed and cooked a deer though.

Developer Response ,

Hey thanks for the feedback. Working on a revamped tutorial system which will help with using the bow. For now...when you equip the bow tap the camera button to aim. That will make it much easier!

Beautiful but flawed

I preordered this game and was really excited to try it out. The graphics did not disappoint at all. It is truly a stunning game. My main issue with the game is the fact that your son needing fed will send you back to the beginning of the level. There is already so much going on that adding a time limit makes the game too frustrating to be fun. I like the concept of having to take care of your son and it makes you care about the characters more, however I feel like you should be able to carry food with you and feed your son along the way without having to stop and hunt a deer every ten minutes just to be able to progress. Like many other reviewers I really wanted to like the game and was drawn in by how beautiful it is but stopped playing after a few hours just because I didn’t want to have to feed my son so often.