As an avid gamer and content creator focused on in-depth analysis, I was intrinsically drawn to Grey Skies: A War of the Worlds Story. The premise of a stealth-action take on the HG Wells sci-fi classic captured my imagination right away. What fan wouldn’t relish guiding a survivor through a digitally-realized Martian invasion? Yet as a professional reviewer familiar with the high standards of AAA experiences like The Last of Us or the rich interactive storytelling of indies like Firewatch, I also tempered my enthusiasm with skepticism. Could this tiny two-person studio fully deliver on the promise of their concept? After over 20 hours traversing Grey Skies’ glitchy English countryside, I have a conclusively negative answer.
Crashed Expectations
Grey Skies elicits an immediate sense of disappointment and bewilderment. The disjointed prologue frantically careens from Mars vistas to a plane crash site to pre-disaster grocery shopping at a pace that feels less artistic and more inept. Rather than establishing stakes through evocative storytelling, the game confuses and obfuscates. This disorienting opening exemplifies Grey Skies’ consistent struggles with narrative focus, technical polish, and pacing.
Plodding through the aftermath of the plane crash perfectly encapsulates these critical weaknesses. Harper moves at a mollasses pace for over five real-time minutes through repetitive environments while intense music inappropriately blasts. Neither the visuals, music, nor limping movement evoke a survivor struggling to escape catastrophe; instead, dull repetition batters the player like an assault. One can instantly recognize the lack of playtesting and complete absence of dynamic pacing. This complete design failure establishes an amateurish, disjointed sensation that permeates all aspects of Grey Skies.
The technical presentation similarly alarms. Muddy low-polygon models and blurry textures clash against the detailed assets expected from contemporary Unreal Engine 4 games. Although Grey Skies doesn’t aim for photorealism, the environmental art lacks attention to detail or dynamism across the board. The world feels less like a lived-in English village besieged by aliens and more like a developer’s unfinished backyard constructed for practice. Coupled with wooden voice acting and an forgettable soundtrack, the experience skirts immersion at every turn.
Half-Implemented Mechanics
Like the visuals, Grey Skies’ core mechanics feel more prototype than finished product. The requisite crafting system functions as expected, allowing you to scavenge components to produce distraction items, weapon upgrades, lockpicks, and useful aid like health kits. However, navigating the inventory and looting debris highlights major issues. Harvesting required crafting ingredients like Red Weed involves finicky pointing, while the limited inventory space mandated item shuffling after nearly every encounter. These fiddly pain points transform basic actions into exercises in frustration.
The stealth sections central to progressing through areas offer equally clunky execution. Avoiding zombie-like humanoids or larger tentacled Martian drones simply follows a rudimentary pattern: crouch-walk slowly, craft distraction items, and occasionally hide in lockers stashed throughout the environment. Rather than providing dynamic challenge through advanced AI behavior, progression mainly relies on trial-and-error and tedious repetition. If caught by a creature’s instant-kill attack? Simply respawn at plentiful checkpoints to try again via practically the same approach.
According to public play time records, Grey Skies’ campaign averages 8-10 hours long. Yet only 3 of those hours focused on War of the Worlds’ iconic elements like the alien red weed. Instead, players endure hours of ransacking dreary houses and underground tunnels to enable Harper’s ill-defined trek towards London. Though directly tied to the source material’s setting, these environments exude all the excitement of performing virtual chores.
Optimization Woes
Considering the limited scope and dated visuals compared to AAA titles, one may excuse Grey Skies’ merely functional gameplay and narrative as expected from an indie passion project. Perhaps if the overall experience proved polished and stable, the derivative design could be enjoyed ironically like a B-movie. Unfortunately for prospective players, shoddy optimization cripples the already fragile product.
In my extensive playthrough, Grey Skies crashed outright twice – forcing full game restarts and losing all interim progress. Interacting with bodies of water also caused Harper to freeze in place, locked in an animation glitch that blocked completion unless I reverted to a previous save. While these severe examples plagued only a minority of sessions, I observed persistent light artifacting, choppy frame rates in outdoor areas, and extended load times after every death. Even menu navigation suffered from noticeable input lag and response delay to button presses.
Again drawing comparison to higher-budget titles, these pervasive technical issues indicate serious deficiencies in quality assurance and playtesting – unacceptable oversights no matter Grey Skies’ independent status. Warping out-of-bounds or falling through geometry may verge on comically amateur, but still utterly shatter player immersion. Faint silver linings exist in a recent patch addressing some crashes, yet this level of jankiness remains reprehensible.
A Failure to Launch
Evaluating Grey Skies on its own merits while accounting for its indie pedigree, the multitude of flaws still overwhelmingly overshadow the kernels of a compelling experience. Considering the rich lore and iconic imagery of The War of the Worlds, the limp narrative and poorly-utilized setting particularly sting. When the vaunted Martian war tripods finally appear as imposing enemies, they get introduced via a hackneyed fetch quest rather than through a cinematic set-piece assault. Instead of towering over buildings blasting their dreaded heat rays, the battle machines’ implementation in Grey Skies falls as flat as the fizzling steam effect emitted from their flaccid tentacles.
Overall as a professional gamer and critic, I can only recommend Grey Skies to the most indulgent and patient of hardcore War of the Worlds devotees. Even with deep discounts, the package offers maybe 90 minutes of fan service buried under hours of frustrating, repetitive generic survival and consistent crashes. Due to these weaknesses inherent in its conceptualization and design, Grey Skies fails to escape the surly bonds of its earthly development limitations. This game hardly elevates higher than a few meters before abruptly nose-diving right into the cold dirt.
While some issues could get smoothed via extensive patching, I predict only fundamental mechanical and narrative pivots could begin to repair the structural flaws undermining this project. Unfortunately given the tiny team size and relatively niche focus, I doubt the creators possess adequate resources for such extreme rehabilitation efforts compared to revenue potential. We War of the Worlds fans must keep dreaming of our perfect alien invasion experience. In the meantime, play Jeff Wayne’s charming retro game or even watch the Tom Cruise adaptation film to fill that Martian-fighting void. Just keep avoiding this Grey Skies plane crash.
