Review: Skydrift

A couple days ago I wrote about downloadable games, ideally, being perfect little bites of gaming designed for the short experience. They’re either well-crafted, focused experiences, or they’re grasping for big budget success and gasping for air.

Skydrift falls in with the latter group, but it does so with a huge asterisk. I’d say it’s a near great game. Yes, it feels like it’s missing something, and it’s definitely got aspirations bigger than its budget, but very few games offer quite as solid a core mechanic.

The core of Skydrift feels like a combination of the plane levels from Diddy Kong Racing and Hydro Thunder. That is, you fly planes around tracks at incredibly high speeds while your opponents shoot rockets at your tailpipe. It feels fresh, though. It does this by creating the traditional kart race “rubber band” without feeling cheap. In effect, everyone gets the same items, but everyone can turn these items into boost. If the player in first does this, they get a tiny bit; if the player in second does it, they get a few seconds worth; if the player in last does it, well, they’ll be boosting for fifteen seconds. Players can also do stunts – primarily flying through difficult places – to get even more boost.

What this creates is a gameplay loop that makes Mario Kart‘s blue shells look amateurish. Players behind the pack can go out and collect items and choose between making them into boost to close the gap or using them to shoot down the plane in front of them (which also gives a hefty boost). The player in first, meanwhile, isn’t made to feel like everyone’s targeting him. To stay ahead, he has to perform stunts, drive recklessly, and manufacture boost. That’s difficult, though. One slip up, and boom: lead change.

It helps that the flying is so tight, the races so intense. This cribs heavily from the Hydro Thunder school: your controls aren’t so tight that you’re always exactly where you want to be, but there’s a good, physical heft to the controls so that it feels like you’re flying a massive airplane. There’s joy to this flying. Same with the weapons, which follow traditional “kart racer” tropes but all of which are well balanced. It even solves Mario Kart‘s age old issue of green shells versus red: the green shell here is a massively destructive autocannon that can shoot down two planes before it runs out of ammo, while the red’s lucky to shoot down one.

Skydrift, in effect, nails the risk versus reward that makes arcade racing fun. You’re making choices, lots of them, very quickly, about what you need to prioritize. Do you need weapons? What kind? Missiles. But you already have mines and armor, so you better change them into boost. And then the track splits, and you’re making more choices.

None of this would matter if the tracks were poor, and the tracks are good, ranging from traditional lava and ice levels to ruined oil tankers and mining expeditions. Yeah, nothing particularly unique, but they’re nicely designed for the crafts that you have access to and feature well-designed paths. The caveat here, as we move into the big asterisk next to Skydrift’s near great status, is that there are seven of them. There are seven tracks, and while the game throws you at them every which way, it doesn’t take long to get tired of seven tracks. The campaign mode, which will take six hours or so to beat if you just run through it, will give you other modes of play like an extremely good Speed Mode, which replaces powerups with cavalcades of speed boosters, reversed levels, and the highly suspect Survivor mode, which kills off the pilot in last every forty seconds and generally makes you go through a half dozen laps as opposed to the game’s usual two or three.

Let me take a moment on the levels. They’re nice, on the whole, but there’s fleeting moments of brilliance in them. Flying upward through a frozen cave, underneath a dramatically exploding bridge, between halves of an exploded ship, deftly maneuvering through incredibly tight spaces – these are the moments that make the game sing. For each of them, though, there’s a run of stone pillars, a confusing direction, and occasionally awkward obstacles that require rote memorization. And really, I’d love more vertical components of levels: whenever I go up a steep hole I feel like I’m doing something I’ve never done before and it excites me.

The core problem of the game, though, is that it feels soulless I know, it’s a racing game and there doesn’t have to be a story to it, but there’s no personality. You’ll pick deadly generic planes and race them through requisite areas and while everything’s killer it’s all a little empty because there’s no context to anything. Naturally this isn’t something that’s going to bother everyone; it takes a special kind of person to care so much about the local color in a racing game. But by the end I was crying out for the purple genie elephant in Diddy Kong Racing. The announcer of Hydro Thunder. Anyone, really, to appeal to me on a level outside of just the thrill of the race.

In a sense Skydrift is a game with a low dynamic range. It’s plain the developers focused on one aspect, and they nailed it: the game flies brilliantly. None of its other misses can take anything away from just how satisfying the flight mechanic works. If you’re looking for something to scratch that arcade racing itch, Skydrift is absolutely your game. As something to play for hours on end, eh, not so much. But that’s not what it’s trying to do, and it nails what it’s attempting with an unparalleled deftness.