"Loot-rich alien contracts, sunk by mission-wiping crashes"
About
Sketchy's Contract is a co-op looter for up to eight players, set across an asteroid belt where a shadowy client called Sketchy hands out contracts. You board a ship, drop onto exotic planets, and either kill creatures, gather materials, or dig for loot before hauling it all back to hit a quota. The central tension is time: leave a planet at nightfall and the loot respawns for a fresh run, or stay through the dark and push for the better hauls while things get more dangerous. Progress runs through three difficulty tiers, and credits feed into weapons, armor sets, ship upgrades, and cosmetic extras like apartment decoration and pets. It's in Early Access, built largely by a single developer.
Verdict
There's an unusually generous game buried in here for the price, with more enemies, planets and gear than most solo-built projects manage. The stay-or-leave night gamble gives runs a genuine pulse, and a full squad finds plenty to chew on. But the crashes and progress-wiping bugs land on the co-op sessions that are supposed to be the whole point, and Tier 2 balance turns the difficulty into a wall for smaller groups. It's worth watching, and worth playing with friends who can laugh off a lost run, but the stability has to catch up to the ambition before this earns a firmer recommendation.
You'll like it if …
- +you enjoy weighing a safe exit against a greedy push for better loot
- +you play in a full or near-full squad and treat wipes as stories
- +you're happy to ride out Early Access rough edges for a big content pool
You'll dislike it if …
- −losing a mission's haul to a crash or a fall through the floor would sour you
- −you're mostly solo and want a smooth difficulty curve
- −you want a finished, balanced game rather than a work in progress
Breakdown
- +The stay-or-leave decision at nightfall gives each run a real gamble: safe respawning loot versus the richer hauls deeper into the dark
- +The extraction loop of grabbing gear and getting out alive lands well with a squad
- +Choosing which planet, which contract, and how much risk to take makes runs feel like yours
- −Tier 2 spikes into punishing rather than tense, especially for small groups, with enemies that overwhelm rather than test
- −The early game leans harsh in a way that discourages instead of teaching
- +The spread of weapons, armor sets, enemy types, upgrades and collectibles is genuinely large for a solo project
- +Distinct enemies per map, from Gollum and Jolloti to xenomorph-style crawlers, keep encounters varied
- +Ship, apartment and character customization give the credit grind somewhere to go beyond raw stats
- +Map additions have widened the pool players draw from
- −Tier 1 grind turns repetitive fast, running the same loop until you can afford better gear
- −A recent update cut a second world from Tier 1, tightening the early game into one repeated route
- −Progression and loot changes have thinned out the reason to keep going solo
- +Each map carries its own flavour and creature set, giving the belt a sense of place
- +The comedy of dying to your own loot pile or a bad night run produces the stories players actually tell
- −Sketchy and the contract framing stay thin, more a delivery hook than a story
- +Maps are singled out for strong art direction and distinct aesthetics per location
- +Sound design and visual feel pull players back for more runs
- −Performance stumbles even on strong hardware, with a 3080 forced to medium settings
- −Some locations read as loose assets rather than a unified world
- +Stable sessions run cleanly with no frame-rate complaints
- +The developer engages actively with the community and patches often
- −Crashes hit hard in multiplayer, often locking you out of rejoining friends mid-mission
- −Entering orbit can drop you through the ship floor and wipe everything you carried
- −Reported save-file deletion and weapons that stop dealing damage
- −Disconnects erase mission progress and loot outright
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