It’s relatively hard to describe what about Skyrift drew my eye enough that I wanted to review it as I would describe myself as one of those people who fully judge a book by its cover and I’m generally a bit of a AAA whore so indie games often don’t catch my eye but I was scrolling through the review messages that developers send us and I came across the message from Torchlight-Games which peaked my interest when they described their game as “a 3D bullet hell game, but instead of shooting, you deflect bullets back at your enemies!” I’m not the most knowledgeable person out there when it comes to games of the past but as far as I’m aware this is a relatively innovative twist on a well-established mechanic.
Skyrift is one of those, easy to learn, hard to master, type
of games. You have a total of four controls, the left mouse click deflects
projectiles, the E key grabs an incoming projectile and subsequently, the W key
launches the held projectile back, finally the shift key will cause you to
explode energy around you and deflect projectiles from all directions. Where
the skill comes into play here is how you first have to identify which type of
projectile you’re defending against, red, green or blue and then you have to
face the correct direction and either deflect or hold accordingly. There are
three types of projectiles, you have the red projectile which is the most
common that can be either deflected or held, there are the energy bombs (Blue)
which can only be held and then thrown and finally, there are the green
missiles which can only be deflected. Pretty simple right? Well, that’s because
it is.
Don’t go into Skyrift expecting a deep experience, it’s very ‘what
you see is what you get’. Not necessarily a bad thing in its own right but with
how competitive the industry is these days having an interesting idea needs
more behind it if you want to push above the other indie titles especially when
games like Undertale show the world that you don’t need a million-dollar budget
behind you to make something special. I will be keeping an eye on this
developer going forward because I will always value something with an idea more
than a franchise that goes through the motions year after year and most of the
best games come from an idea that has evolved as the game goes further into
development. Skyrift has the idea, it just needs to evolve a little more.
The gameplay takes place in the same area in space and all
you have to do is defend from waves of ships until you die, it never gets past
that. It would be nice if there were some different levels or more variation in
the gameplay because like that one Gears of War achievement said ‘variety is
the spice of life’ and there is no variety on display here. Some parts do stick
the hairs on the back of your neck up a little, most notably when a portal
opens up and a giant dreadnaught comes screaming in from beyond the void which
is pretty much the game’s way of saying ‘shits about to get real now.’
I would like to talk about the graphics for a moment as I
don’t normally put much stock in a game’s visuals as a selling point but I’ve
gotta say I’m impressed with how Skyrift looks, it got a slight mix of
polygonal shapes with an almost cell-shaded look to it and the skybox, or space
box in this case, does look like it goes on into the far reaches of space.
I don’t see Skyrift as a game you’ll be playing for a long time mostly because there’s no depth here, there’s a leaderboard in-game for the truly competitive and the time of writing I’m currently number 1 in hard mode so I challenge anyone reading to beat my score. (I dare you). The leader board will keep the most competitive of players coming back to so they are the best at something which I definitely didn’t do a few sentences ago, for the more casual players however you’ll most likely play this game sparingly in maybe 30 to 40 minute sittings at a time and because it will only ever surprise you once and with the disposable nature of games these days an experience that doesn’t evolve as you play won’t keep you for long.
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Connor Beckinsale
He's a simple man, He sees a game, he plays the game, sometimes he might even like the game but if he were to pick the one thing that will always wrap him in a thick blanket of immersion and hook him until the end of the game its a game with a good story. Though best not speak to him about Mass Effect 3. He's a little sore.
