Skyshine's Bedlam Review (PC)

The recent flood of independent games that's been going on for the past few years have led to the resurrection of dormant genres and mechanics, including the turn-based strategy or rogue-like ones that emphasize tactics and strategy in the face of random events and tough challenges.

After seeing quite a lot of great indie titles hit it big in recent years by combining these two genres and their mechanics, developer Skyshine Games has brought forth Skyshine's Bedlam, a post-apocalyptic strategy rogue-like experience.

By combining elements from FTL or XCOM, with the inherent mechanics and engine seen in Stoic's The Banner Saga, the new title seems like a surefire winner for those that yearn for an old-school experience.

Does Skyshine's Bedlam manage to roll the winning dice or should it be left alone in the wasteland? Let's find out.

Story

Skyshine's Bedlam is a pretty traditional post-apocalyptic experience, but its backstory is quite well-developed, with an array of major and minor characters, not to mention factions with lots of development.

In plain words, you lead a group of survivors in a special Dozer vehicle throughout the wasteland, encountering enemy factions composed of AI-based robots, mutants, cyborgs, and other such things. Everything is out to get you, so you need to head to your destination or, like in may rogue-like adventures, die trying.

However, while the lore is very well developed, your actual story is minimal, to say the least, especially on your first playthrough. The final destination is basically just a small boss encounter and then a brief cut scene. If you really want to make the wasteland a better place and vanquish its tyrant, you have to go in the Double Down New Game+ mode.

Begin the journey in Skyshine's Bedlam

Gameplay

Skyshine's Bedlam has quite a few major gameplay mechanics that all come together in its tactical rogue-like experience. However, while most of them are good or at least decent, the very first takeaway is that the game is challenging right from the get-go. Don't expect to be eased into the experience. There's no tutorial or walkthrough at the beginning of the story so you need to head on over to the special Tutorials section in the menu and watch the different videos created by the studio.

Even so, you'll be taken back by the sheer challenge offered by the game. In my first fight, I went into combat with 5 fighters against 4 enemies. I emerged victorious with just one remaining survivor. Repeat this experience several times and you'll end up without any actual people that can help fight enemies.

You do get to recruit other fighters during your adventures and those that kill enemies get promoted and their stats increase, but every combat scenario poses a serious challenge. One of the bigger reasons for this is that your forces are scattered randomly throughout the battlefield. As such, enemies might have easy access to your weakest fighters.

The game also replaces the tradition turn-based strategy system seen in The Banner Saga with its own two-turn system. Each faction can perform two actions per turn. This means that you need to strike a balance between moving your forces away from danger and actually getting them in range of enemies so that you can take the opponents down. This is easier said than done, of course, and if you don't dispose of your opponents quickly, they enter a Blitz state after several turns, which boosts their abilities and offers a small shield, making the whole fight downright impossible to win.

Besides having to deal with the challenging combat scenarios, you also have to take on the inherent tricky task of surviving in the wasteland. Much like The Banner Saga, you have to juggle certain consumable resources, from fuel for your Dozer, to food for your survivors, and power cells that are used not only to call in attacks from the Dozer onto the battlefield but also to develop its four main areas, such as the infirmary.

While I found the challenging nature quite hard to overcome at the beginning, as you keep on surviving and finding more resources, not to mention fighters, things do get a bit easier. However, they also become a bit more repetitive as the lack of any meaningful story progression doesn't really motivate you to keep going. Yes, the general theme is that is that you're just one group of survivors in a wasteland, but the plot could have given you a bigger role during the actual campaign.

Of course, being a rogue-like experience, death is always a possibility, but at least with the extra knowledge you can restart your journey and plan things in a better way. Those that can complete the experience can go back with the special "Double Down" New Game+ mode that promises more rewards and even bigger challenges.

Lucky unit placement in Skyshine's Bedlam

Visuals and Sound

Skyshine's Bedlam is a great-looking experience thanks to the engine that already showed its power with The Banner Saga. The cartoonish style and the over-the-top animations make the whole violence seem a bit hilarious but the quality is still there.

The soundtrack isn't that out of the ordinary, featuring a mix of songs that keep the action going with western influences, especially since there's no voice acting.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion