I will preface this review by stating that I finished this game about four months ago, and my memory might be a little hazy. I own it on Steam due to getting it in an RPGMaker humble bundle, and actually finishing it says a lot about its quality.

In summary, Skyborn is an RPG that doesn't do anything amazing or extra-ordinary, but it does what it does well, and it is actually worth paying for if you want a good Steampunk RPG game. Every system in the game is done well enough that it doesn't feel required to tweak it to the max, but utilizing the systems feels like it helps you quite a bit. Notably the gem system, where you can apply gems to items to get stat boosts, is well done. You want to use up the gems, because why not, but the unique ones (which the game tell you are unique, so you know to be careful with them), you want to save for a sufficiently nice piece of armor. The characters have classes, but not so much to call a class system, rather they get 'upgrades' to their stuff at set intervals in the story, where you can choose to specialize them in certain ways. The game goes over what changes in great detail, IE 'They learn damage over time abilities' or 'They learn more tanking and damage reduction abilities'. Since you decide them all at the same time, you can craft your party to be how you like.

The game does a good job of explaining its tanking and battle systems, and unlike most games with a threat system for single player, you actually do have to worry about pulling threat off the tank, as its all or nothing. The tank can start with a taunt and do high threat abilities, but abusing high damage AoE abilities can pull the enemies off of him and have them wail on the DPS. It feels a little MMO-y, but the core of the typical JRPG system is there, just with the added system to let you manage who is taking damage and thus getting heals.

The story is well done, it does have threads of an over-arching major threat-to-the-world plot, but a lot of the scene to scene moments are character driven, helping you get invested. I wouldn't nominate any of the characters for any pillar of gaming awards, but it does a good job of making you want to see the story through to the end, and that is all you need sometimes.

In short, this is a traditional-esque JRPG, with some additional systems that add to gameplay, and quite a few optional challenges like arenas and bonus bosses. I finished it once, and its still on my list to do all the optional challenges, though I don't know if I'll ever get there. It is worth the money, especially if you can find it on sale on Steam or similar.