Beyond a Steel Sky
In a small village in an area called The Gap a strange and frightening thing has occurred. A young boy, Milo, has been abducted by a strange vehicle that appeared out of the nearby lake. The vehicle quickly escapes and leaves everyone in distress. You will be playing the part of Robert Foster, a man who knows something about adventure, and surviving. Your mission will be to track down that vehicle and rescue Milo. The thing is, nothing is ever that simple, and so begins your adventure into Beyond a Steel Sky.
The game is a follow-up to Beneath a Steel Sky, and it continues Foster’s story as it causes him to return to Union City, the place where he helped save a long time ago. Many things have changed, and it will make things challenging to do what needs to be done. This is a point-and-click adventure game that will have you traveling through several different sections of Union City. You will have to go undercover to navigate through the city, and there will be times that even that won’t be enough. You’ll get to interact with a list of characters, some I, personally, wanted to strangle to death, and others that will leave you wanting to move heaven and earth for them. Those emotional attachments are made even stronger by the voice acting in the game (which was done amazingly well).
The main gaming mechanic that you’re going to have to master is hacking. You will have access to a device that will allow you to hack into specific machines and when you are able to do that you can mess around with some of the coding in the machines. I do recommend to keep random “crazy” tampering to a minimum, as fun as it is I did get burned on trying to get past a specific section that required me to switch information between two devices, unfortunately I had previously swapped some stuff out of one of the machines and so I had to backtrack trying to rectify the issue. That being said, this is a very well crafted mechanic that adds an extra layer to the game and definitely allows for humorous events to occur.
The flow of the game was for the most part smooth, and kept me fully engaged. The only time where it got a little bit bumpy was as a result of something I did earlier in the game coming back to haunt me. If you are a fan of point-and-click adventures you need to get this one. Having never played the first game I can safely say that this game is strong enough to stand on its own. There are definitely references to actions that you have taken, if you have played the first game, but it was done in such a way as to make you get to know the world you are in even better. I think it's clear to everyone that I really enjoyed this game, and for anyone out there looking for a very solid, good looking, well crafted point-and-click adventure game, you’re going to want to add this to your library.