Skopje ’83 review: I was there when it happened

I was there and I don’t remember this

In 1983 my family took a trip to my parents’ motherland, at the time Yugoslavia. Once we made it into Europe our JAT flight was always from Zagreb, Croatia into Skopje, Macedonia, where our family was from (well, more like the surrounding towns and villages). Even as a child I remember the stark Brutalism architecture and design that was prevalent in the capitol city and its monuments, and how the decay of post-Tito Communism was bringing tensions to light. Oh, there were also the Reagan/Russia nuclear war fears that were weighing things down. Ouch!

Skopje ’83 takes that era, centers it on that city, and mixes some nuclear timey-wimey shenanigans into a rogue-like shooter that has some interesting base material but never actually lets it bubble up to its full potential.

Die and restart, die and restart. It’s that kind of game, drawing on loot pickups and FPS shooting and action that’s pretty commonplace in the genre right now. It has some of the ZombiU feel, where we respawn from a hub and have to recover our path in a zombie infested world. There’s a weird “huh, something’s not quite right” vibe prevalent to the game’s world, on purpose, and a nuke that goes off if we don’t get everything done in time. Whoops!

But It’s not new. We’re not going to find anything that sets it apart from other games in the genre. It’s just a loop, over and over, of shooting and looting and shooting again, usually at hordes and some bigger enemies. That loop is good, it’s consistent, it’s SOLID, but It feels like it’s missing that ONE THING that really makes it unique, that really makes us go “oh shit, that’s a cool ass gameplay mechanism.”

Because of all of that, there are three conflicting issues I’m finding with the game:

1. It’s not a new idea, and therefore it often feels like we’re retreading a lot of things that we’ve done elsewhere in other games.
2. Its upgrade and crafting paths end up being overly tiring, and may take what feels like forever to find what we need to progress.
3. It has a great comic book aesthetic, and it’s often worthy of stopping and staring, but it feels like a filter rather than a design choice. WHY does it look like this? WHY are the lines and the colors and the shapes this way? Is it just a visual? How does that tie into the game thematically?

Now, personally I do have a bit of a soft spot for the game. I still have family that lives there. I love reading the signs in Cyrillic, I love the music and language and accents that are prevalent in the game — this is exactly what TV shows in the 80s and 90s there sounded like when they were aping Americana — and I love seeing that Brutalist Balkanism.

But right now that’s the only thing that keeps me going to it, my own personal nostalgia. I wish there was more, but there isn’t. It needs that big hook, that foundation, that makes us ready for the nuke when it does eventually go off.

This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and video courtesy publisher. This video first appeared on The SideQuest for January 30, 2026.