Skylight Freerange 2: Gachduine Review

It has been a while since I played a game I did not like as much as this. Skylight Freerange 2: Gachduine was created by Dragoon Entertainment Ltd and launched on PS4 and PS Vita. This is one of those games that makes me wish I was not a PlayStation gamer and instead played on an XBox, to have saved myself from this mess.

My hopes were high going in, one thing that this game does well is allow the player to customise themselves with a lot of freedom. It allows you to choose your gender, your skin tone, hair colour, the works, but also allows you to go in to more detail, such as letting you choose if your hair is asymmetrical or if your hair has two different colours in. Customising your character is fun in theory, but it’s seriously hindered by how terrible this game looks. Colours that would go nicely together in any other game look terrible in this one, which is quite a let down. I appreciate the representation in this game however, there is a diverse cast of characters, all with different looks and there is an equal amount of males and females. Kudos to the creators for that.

I think I should mention how much nudity is in this game, to the point where it just felt unnecessary. I am all for sex and healthy relationships, but this game seemed to just have their characters strip for the sake of it. There are times when sex is described in quite graphic detail as well, which also feels unnecessary and at times I was reading it thinking ‘why did the creators feel like adding this dialogue in?’ which is quite disappointing, but you just come to expect it after a while.

The world you play in is flat and bare, and the colours are unappealing to look at. Buildings are windowless and have no texture and looking up at the sky leaves a lot to be desired. The game also lets you choose the story out of quite a few options, so it does have an interesting in-depth story line. Your choices do affect your story, and there are constant dialogue pop ups where you choose how to react to what people are saying. The freedom that you have within the game when it comes to carving your own path is cool, but I do not actually know how much your choices affect the story line. When picking between two dialogue options, I cannot say I know how a character will react if you choose one over the other. In my experience, the choices they gave were quite similar, so I cannot imagine how many of the choices actually affect the game.

Alongside that, you choose what kind of fighter your character is. There are a large range of options, so they should suit the kind of player you are, but the fighting in the game is quite confusing. I really had no idea what was going on during my first combat scene and I did not really have a clue the whole time. Stuff around you sorta just happens and I was shooting characters, but I cannot tell you if I did that through pressing a button or if it just happened itself. I am leaning more towards the latter, because I was so confused I would not be surprised if the game took pity on me and helped me out a little bit.

The worst thing about this game is that it is actually finished and this is what was released. Why anyone would want to tie their company to this game, I do not know. I think it is also humorous that if you go on Metacritic and read reviews, there are two user reviews and one is supposedly from Naughty Dog. The review goes on to share that they are planning on making a Nathan Drake skin in the multiplayer that was inspired from this game. I promise you, Naughty Dog would never taint their award-winning games with something like this.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Sony Playstation 4 code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.