Skies Above (Switch)
In Skies Above, whales known as Leviathans can swim through the air and even outer space with incredible ease thanks to their inherent magical abilities. When they visit other planets though, their magic begins to take root there, and when humans discover the potential of this power, they seek to get it straight from the source. While greedy corporations manufacture robots to harvest the magic from the Leviathans, there are still kinder folks who want what’s best for the whales, helping them to safely escape the planet’s atmosphere so they can have peace. Only one more Leviathan remains trapped on the planet, and in this action rogue-like, you take on the role of the rebel who is going to help them break free of the world that only wishes to exploit them.
Skies Above is all about riding atop that last Leviathan as it makes its break for the sky, the majestic beast looking quite gorgeous as the game seems to know where to apply detail for maximum effect. The characters in the game barely have any facial features and the robots you face are all spheres, but the whale that serves both as where you must stand during an escape attempt and what you must protect is intricately realized while the island where you recover and prepare for the next attempt also features some beautiful detailing for its lush environment. Technically, there aren’t many places to be seen in the game after all, the flight atop the whale taking you higher and higher into the stratosphere, but cloud layers don’t require much work to realize and detail could actually get in the way of some of the game’s fast-paced action if it was overdone.
To protect the last Leviathan, your main means of attack will be latching onto the many small spheres as they come to try and fire upon it. Should the whale run out of health, it will crash back down to the area where you start, but if you’re able to keep it safe long enough, it will be able to build up a charge that lets it rise up to the next layer of the sky. Essentially, Skies Above is a game about endurance, the goal being to buy the whale the time it needs by repelling the robot attacks as quickly and efficiently as possible. The unnamed rebel you play as usually can only harm foes by landing on them though, but he is an incredible jumper and fairly agile. As soon as you land on one sphere, you can leap off to the next one, destroying the one you left in your wake. With incredibly zippy movement, you can launch yourself from robot to robot rapidly to wipe out a bunch at once, and the somewhat random appearance of the spheres ends up leading to you needing to figure out on the fly how to make a conducive path between the enemies. You can do midair jumps or use a hook to latch onto them, but these are limited in use until you land back on the whale, and any time lost is giving more time for the robots to open fire on the Leviathan.
The style of play in Skies Above ends up simple but very fast-paced, the player needing to identify optimal attack paths on the fly, know when to use their extra movement options, and try to make sure tougher robots are dealt with swiftly. As you reach higher in the clouds, new spheres appear with things like shields, powerful laser attacks, or the ability to strengthen other robots. Most of these will still be easy to destroy in one hit (or two when you need to break the shield first) so they’re technically not more difficult to handle, they simply extract a greater toll if you don’t prioritize them. This does give some much needed direction to your action instead of always trying to wipe out as many robots at once, getting to a specific stronger robot not always going to be the easiest travel route through the air. However, it does feel like Skies Above is still sorely lacking in enemy variety since the spherical machines are all so similar in how you approach them and what they can even do. Besides the ones with special abilities, most of them even just fly in and float in place as they open fire on the whale, meaning they’re essentially just waiting for their turn in the chain to be blown up. There is a final boss as well as the rare trapped Leviathan spirit that takes multiple hits to break, but it too is just a big orb. Sometimes you might encounter bad weather that seems like it could have lead to some interesting shifts in the fights at least, things like snow just limiting your midair jumps, but these feel like they have limited impact and don’t even last that long. Some visual clarity for zipping around the air from foe to foe so quickly might have lead to the limited designs, but it also means playing through run after run relies mostly on the satisfying kinetic movement to entertain rather than unique opposition or impressive new sights.
Skies Above is a rogue-like, meaning each loss requires you to try the whole run again, but it is also one that allows for you to improve your character and the Leviathan between runs via upgrades. Back on that serene landing spot you crash down to after a failed attempt, you can use the money earned from breaking robots or other resources you can gather to give yourself new skills or make certain aspects of the game easier. Some of these are pretty expected, you can give the whale more health or raise how much money you earn from breaking machines, but there are also more specific things like increasing how fast the whale charges that make those early simpler cloud layers go by much faster. It’s not very likely you’ll reach the end until you’ve invested in some key upgrades to shorten the time spent and how well you can respond to danger. For example, there is initially no chance at healing when out flying, but you can buy the ability for a green meteor filled with healing rocks to appear on occasion and increase how much health can be earned by breaking the chunks that break off it. Giving yourself more jumps greatly increases your efficiency, and there are even two special attacks that can be whipped out in a pinch to wipe out huge swathes of nearby enemies if you time it right and don’t waste their charges.
Skies Above ends up slipping into a nice reliable rhythm as a result of this upgrade system. You head out, do the best you can to get as far as you can, and when you return to the safe haven, there will almost always be a fair bit to do. You can unlock fishing where feeding the whale what you find can give small passive boosts, you can invest in a little robot buddy of your own that helps in small ways, and you’re pretty much always going to be able to afford some upgrade when you return provided you’ve gotten the hang of the basic flow of battle. You always feel productive even if a run feels like it went a bit poorly, making it easy to hop back on the whale and hope the new purchases you made will make it more likely you’ll succeed this time around. You will need to be a deft hand at rapidly taking out the orbs in the air to win eventually, but upgrades to things like the charge time and healing do feel key and besides one specific “Fragile Rune” that can be randomly crafted and only lasts one run, you’ll never get too overpowered to the point you can take it easy when out in the skies.
The dynamic action as the music pumps you up to keep fighting does work well for the time it lasts, but once you have finished the main game of Skies Above, it does offer a way to keep playing that avoids invalidating your work to help that last Leviathan. You still get to head out and fight the orbs in the sky, likely working towards the last few upgrades you didn’t buy or some of the optional cosmetic touches like new colors for the whale’s magical glow. However, it also changes the goal some, the action actually becoming a bit easier since it doesn’t escalate as much and it instead likes to mix most of what you’ve seen already around. It is nice there is something after the credits roll if you do want to keep going, but it doesn’t have as much direction as the main journey or the progression that made that climb through the clouds work as well as it did initially.
THE VERDICT: Skies Above has a nice sense of flow in its action and its progression. Zipping from orb to orb in the air is dynamic and involves some forward-thinking to give you the most effective path through your foes, and back at base between runs, you’ll almost always be able to get something to help with the next attempt. There isn’t too much variety in the foes you face though, the inherently energetic movement carrying the play more than the dangers you face. Skies Above looks lovely and uses music well to add to the fast-paced aerial fighting, but it can grow a touch repetitive when the main thing differentiating runs is what you bring with you rather than what you face up in the skies.
And so, I give Skies Above for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY rating. Launching yourself from robot to robot and seeing them explode in your wake is a bit thrilling, especially when there’s a big cluster you can wipe out in a split second with good movement. However, Skies Above mostly relies on just throwing more and more orbs at you with the occasional appearance of types with a single simple trick to try and guide you into varying up your pathing. Admittedly, those spheres containing Leviathan souls might show why baddies were kept so basic. Hitting the soul spheres sometimes feels like it’s not working right, you can’t latch onto it so it can’t be linked into the usual combos, and it take a good deal of hits to shatter. The rewards are proportional to the effort in that case, but if more enemies were designed to break you out of the flow of dashing around and easily eliminating enemies, perhaps it would lose some of the dynamism that gives it a basic sort of satisfaction. At the same time, there’s some undeniable repetition involved in not having to vary up your play much, but at least having more dangerous orbs to prioritize or occasional helpful things to target like the healing meteor introduce reasons to shift your approach. It keeps the game from truly becoming too basic to enjoy and you’ll likely be able to clear the whole journey before it can wear out its welcome entirely, although returning for that post-game isn’t as appealing because there’s nothing new left after the main game’s escalation. The progression is well-paced to keep you moving through that initial journey to help the last Leviathan and that dries up in the post-game’s more simple growth, but Skies Above does still provide an effective rogue-like experience for a while with a movement system that isn’t too deep but is enjoyable when it gets room to really shine.
There were a few technical issues I faced in Skies Above, things like minor hitching in the safe area, a point where I fell through the ground there but could immediately get back out, and the in-game achievement system would wipe out specific achievements each time I exited the game. However, these might be fixed in time and aren’t too disruptive. Perhaps Skies Above could also receive updates to strengthen reasons to return to the game or add more enemy variety, but beyond the technical flubs, most of its issues are more about limited scope rather than true flaws. Skies Above needed to keep evolving and growing in terms of the challenges ahead, but it does at least have an effective enough flow for the offerings it does have. There’s still something majestic about the way the Leviathan moves that calls to you, there’s something thrilling about rapidly springing off orbs to obliterate them in seconds. The action may not reach atmospheric heights with its design, but Skies Above is still able to hit a few highs in the time you spend with it.