Reaching for the Sky

Skylore checks off the boxes for fantasy MMORPG mobile games and knows it in the most tropey way possible. This game is aware of its absurdity. It was more complex to make a character than it is to play. Players just must regularly hit the “auto” button and the game plays itself. And maybe that’s why I keep playing it. I certainly am not playing it for plot, combat, or player mechanics. The basic nature of those features doesn’t stand out to appeal or appall. They are typical and easy like the game itself. This is not, by any means, a hardcore game. But Skylore is not attempting to be hardcore, and therein lies the charm. Players can hit that auto-action button, and just watch their character run from one quest to the next. Hardcore? Absolutely not. Unbearably charming? Undoubtedly.

Skylore: All Lore, No Sky

Players start off simple, building a character from templates and then dropping right into quests that act as the tutorial. A tutorial that was barely needed because the mechanics were so self-explanatory. The colors and music and ease of movement made Skylore’s gameplay pleasant. Socializing, for an online game, is at a minimum – if required at all. Playing it for several days, I never touched the global chat box and did not delve into the party dungeon crawls, called “matches” in-game. Not because I was focused on the linear quests, but because I did not realize they were there. Skylore does not inundate players with pop-ups for features and in-game purchases and events. In fact, the UI is very clean and uncluttered. Which is always a ten out of ten in my mobile game book.

Auto-Piloting

Despite there being a lot to do in Skylore, the “auto-action” button does take away a level of player engagement from crafting to combat. I will give players this warning, this is a dangerous button. Handy, but dangerous. Hitting the auto-action, I put the game down to do something else and looked back over to see my little goblin in the middle of a massive hoard. The panic was real. Entirely my own fault, but I will say the game – in a way – set me up for that hilarious failure.

The Cyprus-based company Titulum, the developers of Skylore, does not have a long line of games to their name. Titulum’s only other game, Warspear Online came out over 10 years ago and holds over 5 million downloads, but only rates a 3.7. Skylore, having only come out last November 2022, is still probably too new to know if it will surpass its elder. But, for the sake of charming MMORPGs everywhere.