Lost Skies

Lost Skies asks you to grapple onto a drifting island, strip it for parts, and bolt those parts onto a flying ship that you and a crew built by hand -- and when that loop is working, reviewers keep reaching for the same word: potential. Bossa Studios built this on the bones of Worlds Adrift, its own multiplayer sandbox MMO that spent two years in early access before the studio pulled the plug in 2019, telling players the game was "no longer commercially viable." Lost Skies is the do-over, and its central drama is whether Bossa has actually fixed what killed the original or just given the same problems a new coat of paint. A year and change into this release, the honest answer is: partly, and slower than anyone hoped.

The grapple and the ship are the real thing

Strip away everything else and the moment-to-moment traversal in Lost Skies is good. The grappling hook is the single most consistently praised system in the game's review history -- players call it "on point" once they've learned its arc, and it's the tool that turns a field of floating rocks into something you can actually move through with intent, swinging and hauling between islands instead of just flying past them. Ship building sits right alongside it. One player, writing a negative review they clearly didn't want to write, still singled out "some of the best sky ship building I've ever experienced" before getting to everything that went wrong afterward. That combination -- distinctive movement plus a deep, modular construction system -- is exactly the kind of thing Worlds Adrift fans came back for, and on the evidence of the reviews, it's the one promise this game has actually kept.

The visuals back it up. The fractured island world, the storms rolling between chunks of broken land, the sense of scale when you're piloting a ship you assembled yourself through open sky -- these get praised even by players who are actively warning others off buying the game. "The concept is great, the visuals are beautiful," reads one review posted on launch day of Early Access, before pivoting straight into a list of crashes and broken keybinds. That pivot -- genuine praise for the foundation, immediately followed by a specific, concrete complaint -- is the shape of almost every review this game has ever received.

A five-month Early Access run, and a launch that raised eyebrows

Lost Skies entered Steam Early Access on 18 April 2025 and left it on 17 September 2025 -- just short of five months. Even outlets sympathetic to the game noticed the pace: the Rock Paper Shotgun piece syndicated through Lost Skies' own Steam news feed opened by admitting surprise that the game was already hitting 1.0, noting it "could have done with a bit more time in the oven." Bossa's own community post ahead of launch acknowledged as much directly, conceding "there's no denying that the game had bugs when it launched into Early Access" while promising the team had "worked hard on squashing them" in the months since.

Players weren't convinced the math added up. "They rushed the '1.0' launch," reads one of the highest-voted reviews from launch week, "and are saying that its early access period is over meanwhile still having tons of bugs, and the patch notes for 1.0 were a mere handful of bug fixes." Another Worlds Adrift veteran, writing under the same frustration, put it more bluntly: Bossa "took six months in early access where they released 'one major content update and four hotfixes' and decided that the game is ready to leave EA already." The "Day 30" patch that followed on 16 October 2025 did little to change that read -- it's remembered in reviews as maintenance, not the substantial follow-through players were waiting for.

None of this happens in a vacuum. A large fraction of Lost Skies' most-voted reviews, positive and negative alike, open by identifying themselves as Worlds Adrift players first. That game entered its own early access in mid-2017 and was discontinued two years later, in July 2019, with Bossa citing insufficient new-player interest. For that audience, an unusually short Early Access window and thin launch patch notes don't read as an isolated decision -- they read as a pattern repeating, and the reviews say so explicitly and often.

The bug that won't stay fixed

The single complaint that appears most often, across the widest span of dates, is data loss. Ships disappearing outright. Storage containers resetting or reassigning ownership. Entire character saves becoming unusable after a crash mid-save. This isn't a launch-week problem that faded -- it shows up in reviews from April 2025, from the September 2025 1.0 launch, and as late as January 2026, when one reviewer called the game "completely broken in every aspect" with "multiple graphical bugs, multiple inventory bugs, multiple broken islands, constant crashes and disconnects," adding that it was "almost impossible to play in a coop with 4 players." Another, in November 2025, described losing "several hours of work" after a save-and-reload wiped their ship and stored items, concluding flatly that "losing all your progress when you log out makes the game unplayable."

Global achievement data backs up the shape of the problem, even if it can't speak to the cause. Of players who've earned the grapple-hook achievement, only a bit over half go on to earn the one for beginning the main journey -- 37.9% versus 22.4% of the whole player base -- and that number falls sharply again to 7.3% for the early Arbiter encounter. Some of that drop is normal for any game with an open structure; not every player finishes what they start. But it lines up with a specific, recurring complaint about the early hours specifically: a February 2026 review describes dying, respawning in a higher-level zone, and having the run essentially collapse from there, calling the early-game experience something that "completely killed my motivation" despite genuinely liking the world design and ship concept underneath it.

Development also went quiet for a long stretch. After the October 2025 Day 30 patch and a December 2025 stability update, the news feed goes silent until June 2026 -- an eight-month gap. One reviewer writing in May 2026, still mid-wait, put it in terms that echo the Worlds Adrift complaint directly: "the dev team apparently forgot this existed and put it on a shelf since December of 2025." When updates did resume, they arrived as two releases in quick succession: "Ship Scanning, Skill Revamp & Loot Overhaul" in early June, followed shortly by "Storage Fixes, Save Backups & QoL Tweaks" -- which is exactly as pointed as it sounds. That second patch rolled back a data-cleanup process from the update immediately before it that had been "incorrectly removing needed data and causing ship storage loss," and added hourly auto-backups, double-buffered character saves, and an automatic restore-from-backup system with a UI notification if a save gets corrupted. It is, in other words, a patch built to answer the exact complaint that's been the top line of Lost Skies reviews for over a year. Whether it actually holds is the question the next few months will answer, not this one.

Where that leaves the score

Judged purely on lifetime numbers, Lost Skies sits at Mixed -- 62.6% positive across 2,292 English-language reviews. Judged on the 100 most recent reviews as of this writing, sentiment is softer still, at 47% positive, which suggests the save-loss and development-pace complaints haven't faded with time so much as they've kept finding new players to frustrate. Controller support is a smaller but real mark against it too: the store page lists DualSense and DualShock support among its categories, but multiple reviews report it barely functions.

None of that erases what's genuinely good here. The grapple-and-shipbuilding core is exactly the kind of distinctive, well-executed idea that makes a survival sandbox worth talking about, and June 2026's patch shows Bossa is finally building toward the reliability this concept needed from day one. But a game that can still cost a co-op group its shared ship and inventory to a save bug more than a year after launch hasn't earned a recommendation to buy in today, however good the traversal feels in the meantime.

5.5 out of 10. Lost Skies has the bones of the game Worlds Adrift veterans wanted Bossa Studios to make the first time -- a genuinely loved grapple-and-shipbuilding loop wrapped around a distinctive floating-island world -- but a five-month Early Access run, a save-corruption streak that has outlasted the 1.0 launch by nearly a year, and an eight-month development gap between December 2025 and May 2026 keep it from being a purchase most players should make right now. Wishlist it, watch whether the June 2026 fixes stick, and let the pattern of this studio's last live-service game inform how much patience you bring.