One Year On – Under Falling Skies

I’ve played a splattering of Under Falling Skies since the review and I’ve found it a great game to fill those spare moments, generally playing in under an hour. As those spare moments have been whittled away though, it, like most of my hobbies, has found itself shelf bound.

This means I’ve not played it much as a campaign but mostly just the odd standalone game, which is a shame because the campaign brings a nice story to it. Nevertheless, the way you can tailor the game options gives you something different each time and makes every game a challenge, preventing you getting bored of repetitive die rolling and placement.

That is the game’s niche – filling in those spare moments. Once I’d played the campaign through a couple of times, the urge to sit down and commit to another run through, however different it may turn out, just wasn’t there. This didn’t deter from the fact that this is a good and challenging game, though, and it is the challenge that makes it such a good solo filler game. It set up very quickly, the rules were a doddle so if I couldn’t remember what to do it only took a minute or two to get reacquainted. And, as I alluded to, the variables that could be added to the game meant there was always something new to try, presenting a different challenge from the last game and keeping it fresh.

Push the difficulty up and it became a difficult game to beat. It was also pretty consistent in that it didn’t throw a game up very often that was much easier/harder than I’d expect from the difficulty I’d set it to, which meant that when I did beat it, I felt it was down to skill rather than luck – nice.

Other than that, there’s not much more I can add to my review one year on, and I’ll take that as a good thing about Under Falling Skies – it’s a solid game that will keep you entertained even after you’ve completed the campaign several times.

Knowing what I know now, would I still have bought it? Yep. I really enjoyed the campaign, and the way new game mechanisms were introduced to keep it fresh. These options can also be added to a standalone game giving it a lot of replayability.

Will it still remain in my collection? Because it’s so easy and quick to get into, I can’t see me parting with it any time soon – it’s a great solo time filler.

One Year On – Under Falling Skies can be a brain burster of a game, especially at higher levels of difficulty, and will continue to see game time whenever I’m in the mood for a challenge. Whilst dice placement games aren’t for everyone it is a solid game mechanism for a solo game, one that doesn’t need an AI to play against and whilst there are ways to mitigate the die rolls, there’s enough variability there to prevent you from running the same strategy time and time again.

READ THE REVIEW HERE