Sky Fighter (PS3)
Take the trappings of aerial combat in World War 1, filter it to remove the realities of war in favor of a less serious and more colorful alternate world where you can find things like poison gas mines floating about in the air, and add some two-dimensional flight action where the biplanes are more maneuverable than they have any right to be and you’ve created the game Sky Fighter for PlayStation 3. While you might hope there’s more to the experience than this simple combination of a few concepts, as you start to dig into the dogfighting shoot-em-up, it does start to show that exploring its ideas aren’t really at the forefront of the game’s priorities.
Perhaps what Sky Fighter was hoping would be the idea that set it apart comes in the form of its flight controls. While piloting your fighter through the sky as the title implies, you aren’t some zippy craft completely free from the bounds of logic. To do flips and turns you need to consider the orientation of your craft, the plane able to shift direction better if it turns over and makes the turn in the way that would reorient it properly. You can still do a flip without preparing your plane for it, but you can tighten your movement or speed it up by making sure your plane is flying in the best manner to lean into a maneuver. It’s not too difficult to get used to this manner of flying, especially since you can easily make a mental note to turn yourself over before you need to adjust your flight, but since your craft is so small on screen and the side view makes it hard to see the little details, it can be a little difficult to keep track of if your plane is right side up or upside down. With the big bomber craft it’s far more obvious partly because you can barely get them upside down in the first place and they’re much easier to parse in general, but the only huge drawback to being oriented improperly with the smaller aircraft is they can’t drop explosives unless they’re flying normally.
During the game’s missions the player has access to three different aircraft types, the first two being variations on the small but speedy fighter planes that play into the game’s control system best. Flying around the air in these feels smooth enough, but they have different weapon options. Firing in front is fairly dependent on where your craft’s nose is pointing while the back can have a gun whose angle you can adjust within a small range to take care of anyone tailing you, or at least that is the thought process the developers likely had. When you are in a two-dimensional dogfight with enemy craft, everyone seems to realize that the safest place for an enemy to be is incredibly close but just a little off from where the guns can point with ease. When in this situation it is fairly natural to try and flip or tip your plane so the guns can end up pointing at an enemy properly, but they will often adjust in a similar way, the player practically guaranteed to get into bouts where the aerial acrobatics boil down to everyone doing the same circular flips through the sky until the guns line up often enough to take the opposing craft down.
A lot of the game’s missions involve combating tiny aircraft with your own tiny aircraft, multiplayer is about multiple humans or AI players competing in this form of fighting, and the unlockable challenges tend to use a lot of little planes to threaten your survival. This means in most of the gameplay modes you can expect these backflip battles either far too often or as the crux of the mode, and while breaking away can work it can also endanger your plane if they quickly adjust to gunning you down. On certain missions and difficulties you can find a bit more success in breaking this pattern and turning the tables, but it does feel like a lot of the dogfights don’t ask for much creativity in regards to movement, especially since your weapon options are so limited. The small fighters can pick up weapon power-ups so they fire more shots and can kill more quickly, but it doesn’t demand a new form of dodging or really give you a special edge beyond speeding the proceedings up some. Bombs can sometimes work in an aerial fight but lining it up requires a pretty unaware opponent, so you’re essentially always relying on your regular guns and simple maneuvers to win fights that struggle to evolve over the course of the game.
The bomber does feel drastically different from the other two, mostly because it is rather difficult to get it to do any aerial tricks. A flip requires a lot of air space to pull off effectively and it is slow on top of it, and while it has some guns to fight back against more maneuverable little planes that tend to pester it on its adventure, its durability is its better response to incoming aggression. A bomber’s main objectives are mostly about how you handle the ground troops though, the player often needing to bomb certain priority targets with a time limit applied to pressure the bombing craft to do so efficiently. Weapons all have infinite ammo but need to reload after the current set of ammunition of it is spent, so you do at least need to think about when to drop bombs to make your role as a powerful bomber work out. Be too liberal and you can be left open to powerful anti-aircraft guns while you wait for your explosives to refill, but be too cautious and the enemy bases you fly over will be filled with foes who can wear down that plane quickly.
The Campaign’s set of 21 missions automatically pick your plane for you and sometimes provide a retinue of assist craft to help with holding off enemy planes for a while. Each of these missions technically has multiple objectives, the main goal the only required one but secondary ones can be completed to go towards mission scores and grabbing unlockable challenges and multiplayer planes. Optional objectives tend to be things like destroying all non-priority targets while the main goal is often just destroying things it does deem important though, and while the game does throw in some new ideas, expect a lot of required air battles or bombing runs that don’t feel all too different. Some ideas like the mission you need to dodge spotlights or instantly die are different albeit not too exciting since they involve stalling while you wait for light beams to move, and others like bombing a train or set of battleships don’t do enough to diversify your targets to make it feel like your flight skills are being tested in a new or unique way.
Those shifts in design do at least help things avoid being tedious as soon some concepts like the flying poison mines, attack balloons, and other methods of enemy opposition slip into the fold, and while your response is almost always going to be pretty straightforward, the problems extend more to the fact that your methods of interacting with the action are limited and not open to any imaginative applications. If something is firing from below it’s often just about bombing it before it can shoot or flying high enough it can’t shoot you as you bomb it. If it’s a plane in the sky with you, even the faster models of enemy plane can get trapped in the loop-de-loop game until you wiggle from the pattern enough your guns eventually wear them down. Going up against human players who can realize the efficient tactics definitely won’t save the base design from its variety problem, so Sky Fighter becomes a game that’s hard to invest much time into once you understand its controls and how they actually limit the potential for action rather than add interesting complications.
THE VERDICT: While Sky Fighter presents itself as a brightly colored world built out of the optimism of old WWI propaganda reels, it is the missions that truly feel old and a bit too familiar. The more involved flight design of your aircraft unfortunately can’t help the dogfights be more than doing loop-de-loops around the air until your guns line up while trying to make sure the enemy’s doesn’t, and the extra variables like ground targets only ask for simple bombing runs to wipe them out. Sky Fighter does hit on some ideas that imperil you a bit better or apply more pressure with how the threat is presented, but your input will be about the same but with a bit more caution or active dodging. Even if things might look different or ask for a quicker performance, Sky Fighter can’t get out of the rut of most of its action feeling the same.
And so, I give Sky Fighter for PlayStation 3…
A BAD rating. Sky Fighter reminds me of the kind of online flash game you boot up for a few minutes when there is some down time in front of a computer. Killing some time with a noncommittal dogfight game without much substance wouldn’t be too hard to stomach, but buying the game on a PlayStation 3 involves too much work to get into a game that really doesn’t seem built to last as long as it tries to. Mission objectives, despite being varied in the phrasing of what they demand, often just feel like a similar set of familiar air battles and bombing objectives, and having a maze of mines or a boss plane really can’t distract from how much the rest of the game, even its multiplayer and difficult challenges, leans on shallow combat interactions. The entire point of turning over your airplane to maneuver differently seems to suggest that flight will be a more complex process at first but most every plane can easily slip into the same bland air chases. The bomber breaks away from this only by being less maneuverable and too focused on dropping bombs to have its gunning down of enemy craft feel interesting. Sky Fighter feels like it wanted its two-dimensional flight controls to have some texture, a difficulty curve, and unique ways to exploit your movement to get the upper hand in a battle, but it lacks the depth to really make it feel like you’re getting much more out of your plane besides slightly tighter and faster turns that the enemy can imitate anyway.
Carve out a segment of Sky Fighter and serve it alone and it might seem simple yet promising. Put all the pieces together on the same plate though and it becomes less enticing to play through the rest of the content on offer. You won’t find something quick and exciting like an arcade shoot-em-up and you won’t find a strategic battler where the right moves can win you the day. While things are changed around enough that you’re often technically doing something new, the enemies all feel so similar to fight and the objectives don’t break from the basic format enough that it makes the idea of returning to the sky for another battle less and less appealing the deeper you get into the unimaginative missions.