|| PREVIEW || Black Skylands (PC) Origins Demo

Earlier this year, tinyBuild announced one of their upcoming games with Black Skylands. The initial reveal I saw for it pegged it as "Bioshock meets Enter the Gungeon". While I've never really played the former, making this game comparable to the latter was an easy grab for my attention. It's a top-down RPG that heavily focuses on the use of your airship in world that takes to the skies.

At the end of April, they took things an extra step further and released a playable, prequel demo entitled Black Skylands Origins. The demo lasts for about an hour, and it's labeled as a "vertical slice" of the game, meaning that what you see is going to be a tiny sample of as many layers of the game as possible instead of one big chunk of one area.

Unfortunately it took me a bit of time to get to the demo, but boy did it leave me excited. Narrative-wise it sets up the universe in the main game, showing the conflict your people, the Earners are enduring. Left to be nothing but slaves to Kain's Falcons, your people are wiped out almost entirely. A handful remain and it will be up to you in the main game to save them and rebuild everything that was once yours.

Black Skylands is a mix of a few different genres that I never thought could or would work together before. The combat is that of a top-down twin-stick shooter and it works flawlessly. I don't know if there will be more, but the selection of guns in the demo was a lot of fun and each one felt unique to use. As I mentioned above there are RPG elements to what you do, but the piece of the puzzle that felt very different to be included was the inclusion of resource farming. It's a crucial part to rebuilding the areas of your Earner airship, and while it's definitely different it is a lot of fun. There's even a bit of bullet-hell inspiration thrown into the boss fights, which you get to deal with one boss at the end of the demo.

As of right now there is no firm release date, Steam has the game releasing in "Q4 2020". No matter when this game comes out though it's going to be a lot of fun, and you can bet I'll be covering it almost immediately. For now though, if you haven't checked out this demo yet you should.