An Outstanding Arcade Shooter!
Sky Force is a shoot-em up, like those on which you could spend hours
on in an arcade or on home consoles a few years ago, and it is a truly
impressive one. No review can give it as much justice as just plain old
screenshots can. It reminds me one of the best “second generation”
shoot-em ups, 1942, for the weapon system and small planes waves, and
one of the best “third generation” shoots, “Raiden” for the large
enemies and the backgrounds. With such comparisons, one could think
everything is said, but the best is yet to be!
This game offers some original stuff over your usual shoot-em
up games. To go to the next level, you have a contract to accomplish,
which is a percent of destruction of the level. If you fall below the
required percentage, you have to restart the level. In easy mode,
percentages to reach are low but you can only play the first three
levels. So it gives the player a real learning curve without offering
all the levels straight.
You can start the game with three different ships which have different balances between speed and shields.
During
the game, you will see some people on the ground that you have to
rescue, or to avoid killing at least. This adds a bit of stress when
you are surrounded and have to shoot in very tight spaces A good thing,
too rarely seen in such games, is when you die, all your weapons are
released and float around you so you can quickly try to reintegrate
them on your ship. Otherwise, it would be too difficult to regain your
footing halfway through the level.
Technically, it will be short
because if I had to enumerate everything that this game provides you
with, it would take hours, which would be better used to play it
instead. But graphically, not only is the art beautiful but it offers
lots of visual effects usually seen on devices like GBA. This includes
fading, alpha blending, horizontal and vertical scrolling and parallax
scrolling. The explosions are wonderful and gorgeous and do not
interfere with the gorgeousness of the game. The animation is handles
perfectly with smooth movements all over the screen and dozens of
sprites at the same time, and some of them which can be quite hard on
the processor but the game handles it well. Only the scrolling is not
at the same level, but I feel this is due to the hardware limitations
and certainly not from the development team!
The sounds are
amazing since it uses a real mixer for music and sound effects. The
soundtrack seems to be the same format from the Amiga days which still
widely used in the GBA world. It provides the user with a rich
atmosphere which compliments the graphics quite well.
The
options are complete, from music volume/sfx volume, to different keypad
configurations and even an automatic fire if you do not have an NGage.
All
in all, a solid game which could be easily compared to games on GBA,
except the price is a fourth of them! You will truly forget you are
playing on mobile phone. Technical masterpiece with wonderful arts,
very good playability and replayability, it has everything to please
you, even the price is perfect. This game is highly recommended.
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