PEGBRJE: Sky Rogue
Some games ask the hard questions, the philosophical questions, games that bring fantastic imagery and metaphors to life via different mechanics.
Sky Rogue asks the question: “What if you were a plane, and you shot things, and you could upgrade your plane to do it again?”
Sky Rogue is a 3D flight simulator boiled down to its roots with a little bit of pew pew shooting action. Made by Fractal Phase, it gives you control of a single plane at the beginning with the simple goal: shoot your target, don’t get shot, and return to the base to receive your score and payment. If you get sidetracked, you can even go shoot down other objects and drones in the area, do a few loops, and earn more points. What are these points for? Buying ship upgrades, weapons, and heck even new ships to continue the process again and again.
The variance is in the procedural islands that the game throws your way — each island and encounter looks vaguely similar to the previous one, but the target, landscape and layout will all be different. On one run I was shooting down a tanker, but got caught up destroying the massive base on the island and nearly got myself blown up by the very target I was sent to destroy. The next run, just a metric ton of boats everywhere to avoid while I took out a plane. The only thing for certain is that you’ll have a target to destroy, and things wanting to destroy you while you’re at it.
Making a surprise visit is local co-operative via split-screen, giving players the continued feeling that you just purchased an arcade game for the home. This gives you someone else to compete against, if you have another player around wanting to fly and shoot things. For the record, I didn’t have anyone around at the time so I cannot tell you if there is friendly fire. I hope there is. Sorry about that.
If this overview seems somewhat lacking, that’s primarily because Sky Rogue is not a complicated or overtly deep game. It’s perfect for you and a friend to just waste a Saturday afternoon shooting up tankers, planes and naval bases, and that’s what it wants to be. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else, and gives you the tools to best expand your repertoire of shooting up other flying objects. While this may not be something that will change your life or consume hours of time, it will give you something to shoot. Consider it a release.
So why didn’t I make this a double-game post? That’s what I had planned, until I saw the next game on the list, and I fear that this post would get a little lengthy if I attempted to bring such a game into this post. So give Sky Rogue a try if you just have a need for a flight simulator with a lot of missiles that doesn’t need to pretend.
Check out more of Fractal Phase below.
