Sky: Children of Light

Game URL: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2325290/Sky_Children_of_the_Light/
Game Cost: $0 outside of season passes, cosmetics, and in-game purchases.
Pay to Win? Well... kind of, in it's own way of what winning looks like.

Score: Overall, I'd give it a solid 4/10.

Review: 

This game is confusing. The game is quite nice to look at with quite good animations, good music, and runs very well. I do like a lot of it, but the cons so heavily out weigh things that it's gotta be a negative.

The major issue: It has no reason to be an MMO, and I can only think of one reason why it would be, which is putting in a cash shop to try to farm our money on expensive items. This game could have been, very simply, a co-op adventure. Just a short little story for $10 and it would have been worth it. But right now you basically just reset like a roguelite without the action or actual skills growth, just pointless little emotes/actions like high fives.
Pros to this game:

• It looks nice. When you are flying through the sky amongst the clouds and the beasts break through, or you see a picturesque landscape? It's amazing. Simply put, it looks glorious and like a fantasy world. You are still on rails, and but there are truly moments where it shines.

Cons or issues as that's about where the Pro's end:

• The cosmetic system is almost but bought stuff, it appears, and then it doesn't let you buy it there or show you where you CAN buy it, so I have no clue. I don't even understand. We beat the game, got through the story, and got nothing for it. That makes no sense.. give us at least a mask. There are tons of cosmetics, but to get any in game would require multiple playthroughs focusing on ONE spirit and all candles to unlock one item. This is a crazy monetiziation strategy, even for a free game. The battle pass doesn't even unlock stuff but unlocks the ability to go find/buy stuff. The monetization for the 'nests' are actually offensive.
• Constantly losing control of the mouse and view to show pointless things. So I'm running forward and suddenly my view is locked and I can't control the mouse. I can still run/move/interact, but I can't control the view.
• Possibly the worst friend system I've ever seen in any game. It's almost impossible to actually FIND your friend, and since we have no tooltips or tutorial, trying to understand the messed up friend invites is a pain, with friends having trouble accepting and then being phased out randomly after joining you. And because the gameplay is completely linear, them joining you is impossible if you are even a few parts ahead in the area.
• With the flight system, the stamina is really rough. Flying is a lot of fun, it's great soaring all over - but one flap to try to get up uses an entire bar of stamina. It's painful. And then you can fly with friends with holding hands or when being carried, but the second player has some sort of flight options that aren't explained and seem to do nothing but use up stamina.
• One other issue with flight and moving is the ledge issue. We get caught on ledges, a lot. You can use up all your stamina just trying to get UP into the air because you are stuck on a ledge and the game won't let you move until you go backwards and try to fly again. This left me stranded often and if I wasn't with someone I'd have literally been SOL tons of times. So you have to step back from ledges when trying to jump or fly off them, otherwise you get stuck just fighting the ledge. This happens a LOT.
• The UI is clearly not made for PC players as the UI has no tooltips, no info, and is extraordinarly unfriendly. It's completely unintuitive. There are few options, no remapping of keys, the FPS for instance is an icon with arrows on it, that's all. Instruments are painful on PC as it uses the YUIOP, HJKL;:, NM,./ keys instead of the key pad or something. So trying to play is VERY hard when not tapping the screen. The game was designed for touchscreen, and that's fine - but when porting to PC there has to be some sort of changes.
• On the UI, the map is horrible. It looks awesome, that's true, but it's useless. Where are we in the map? What's going on? Can we travel with it? Why do we even have it?
• Locking onto people/objects is rough. If I'm trying to light a candle for something, it's likely someone will be running up near you and you've now used up your candle on them. Trying to interact with a spirit and someone nearby? Chances are you are interacting with them and not the spirit RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU.
• The trailors/screenshots are also not representative of the game. Those are animations, and the screenshots aren't things you can get in game, or if you can they cost hundreds of dollars for cosmetics.
• While playing, it's often hard to go back to things if you miss something. You'll need to restart the entire level if you can, then you can try again. No hints on where things are.
  
  Overall, no. I'd not recommend playing it. It's a wonderful looking game with good music, but the 'gameplay portion' just isn't there, the story isn't there, and the PC side of things is just frustration. If they want to be on the PC market they need to start looking at what the PC market uses and adjust their approach. We aren't smartphones/ipads, we have mouse and keyboard. The Devs need to look at feedback and actually either implement it or hold off on the PC market for now. The prices are also outrageous for a lot of the things and need to be adjusted. There is no way I can justify paying $20 for a season pass, even to share, if we can't actually get to things. There's no way I'd pay $20 for a cape, or $40 for a couch in my player housing (useless housing). I just can't recommend this, sadly, as it is.