I play this game so much that I actually surprised that I’ve never reviewed it. I did call it for a cool thing on the Big Show many months again but I have never gone into my I love Sky Force Reloaded so much.
One of the reasons is that it harks back to an era of gaming when it was the most enjoyable. Way before your consoles and your smartphones. When systems and games were simple but the gameplay was out of this world. I used to love side scrolling platformers and beat-em-up’s but mostly the shooters, 1942, R-Type and Parodius. Sky Force captures all of this. But the main reason why I love it? It’s just mental!
Like I say I have been playing it for months now so I’m pretty far in the physics of the game and far enough into it to give a decent opinion.
In its most basic form Sky Force Reloaded is a top-down, vertically scrolling space shoot-em-up. The aim is to destroy as many of the oncoming enemies as possible and reach the end of the stage. Now that all sounds well and good, right? But there is more, so much more.
For each stage there are 4 main aims. These being to destroy at least 70% of enemies, destroy 100%, rescue all the humans (will explain this later) and stay untouched. Now you don’t have to achieve all of these in a single run. You can choose one and just got for that. The more of the achievements you pick up means that you can move onto further levels.
Also there are different difficulties to each level and you can go revisit them to collect all of the achievements.
The gameplay is pretty simple. As soon as you start the game your main cannons are on autofire so you don’t need to worry about that. All you have to do is to control your ship using your finger which is ridiculously simple to pick up.
You are then set upon waves upon waves of enemies, some that fire at you and some that just bomb towards you kamikaze style. Your job is to dispatch them as quickly as possible. For each enemy ship that you destroy they will leave behind stars that you will need to collect for use later. Also throughout the levels there are humans dotted about. You need to collect them but hovering over them until they get aboard your ship while at the same time blasting the hell at the oncoming hordes. There are also a bunch of secret structures that you blow up in order to obtain more goodies and at the end of most levels there is a boss that you need to defeat.
All sounds well and good right? Well, what about those stars? These can be exchanged in the hangar for upgrades to your ship such as cannons, missiles, bombs and the like.
You can also add additional capabilities such as a shield, a laser and the awesome Megabomb.
Also throughout the levels there are upgrade medals and card to collect. The medals build up to you acquiring more powerful ships and the cards provide you with handy things that will help you along your quest. There are also a number of challenges that you can take part it.
You can play with friends, although no one wants to play with me so I can’t tell you much about that feature.
The graphics are amazing as are the sound and music effects.
This always has me hooked. I couldn’t recommend it more highly. It is however a freemium game so there are some brief ads (which you can remove with an in-app purchase) and you and buy more stars should you require them.
Sky Force Reloaded is available free from the iOS App Store and Google Play.
Paul Wright