It is simultaneously a great joy and an annoying pain in the ass to be a PC gamer with access to Steam. The joy comes from the fact that there are more games under $20 than any one person could play in a lifetime. This is also the pain in the ass—especially for those of us with acquisition syndrome. Especially when they have the crazy Steam sales.
That was a digression. My point is that PC gamers like me sometimes have anxiety about missing something good. With so many games out there, how can we be sure to find the best ones?
Well, of course that’s why you read game reviews. And that’s why PR companies send sites like ours games to review. They want to get the word out. We want to get the word out to you—most often we want to tell you about great games so that you can find them. Sometimes we want to warn you away from wasting your money.
Well, in the case of Digital Reality’s Skydrift, we want to tell you about a game we hope you don’t miss.
Not a flight sim
Video games are the closest many of us will ever come to flying a plane. You and I probably both know people who think that they could fly an actual plane based on their expertise in some game or another. “Oh, I made Grand Admiral of the Rebel Alliance. I can fly a V-wing through an exploding Death Star with my eyes closed.” “Man, I single-handedly destroyed an entire Iraqi tank battalion from my F22 Raptor.” “Give me a chopper and a flight stick, and nothing will take our control point. Nothing.”
Yeah, flying games are immersive and almost always rewarding and fun. There are, of course, two schools of thought in flight games: the “it must be as realistic as possible or it’s crap.” super-realism school, and the “OMG I just want to blow shit up without worrying about rudders and ailerons” school.
Skydrift falls firmly into the second camp. This is an arcade game, through and through—yet it gives that satisfying feeling of “I am a leaf on the wind” that good flight sim video games are basically required to impart. Truly, this is one of those games that allows you to slip into the zone. It gets your adrenaline pumping and after you do something spectacular, you almost want to whoop out loud. Check out this run from my son:
As you can see, the game drops you into a high-speed, intense race scenario with other planes. You have to fly around mountains, through tunnels, under collapsing rock formations, through smokestacks, over lava, and so on. It’s not realistic at all. Your plane is pretty resilient; it has hit points. You can scrape the walls with your wings, bump other planes, and even take a rocket or two without crashing. Think of it as something like Track Mania—it’s more about the speed, stunts, and control. The game is also a lot like Diddy Kong Racing, the old N64 game (you know, the freaking awesome one) in that you have power-ups you can use against your opponents. These include the standard gamut of mines, rockets, and boost. There are also vulcan cannons, shockwaves (which slow down and slightly damage enemies), repairs, and defense upgrades. The power-up system is pretty unforgiving—you have to run right through the power-up to get it. Brushing by isn’t good enough. Of course, this means that you will go out of your way to get power-ups sometimes and you will crash as a result. Also, savvy players will drop mid-air mines right in front of (or behind) power-up locations.
IT'S A TRAP
I can’t stress the feeling of “speed” enough. Skydrift definitely delivers that pulse-pounding feel of speed. This is not a game for the unskilled or those with slow reflexes. It doesn’t slow down. It’s brutal and intensely rewarding. Luckily, the difficulty ramp is appropriate and the tutorial is thorough.
The single-player campaign is long and satisfying. As you get achievements and pull off stunts and other accolades, you’ll unlock new planes as well as new skins for those planes. Planes have stats such as top speed, acceleration, defense, and so on. Certain planes will be better for different playstyles and different levels.
The action gets intense in close quarters. There's an opponent exploding in front of me
The game rewards more than just speed, though. In fact, you need to display skill to get speed. Your boost is critical to winning in some situations, and you earn boost by doing stunts and by hugging the ground. The more you hug the ground, the faster your boost meter refills. Therefore, skill is rewarded heavily. You also need to master the knife-edge position immediately (turning your plane vertically) as there will be many situations which render it critical. Also, do a barrel roll and use the boost to power through.
Crashing is obviously not desirable, but you’re not penalized too heavily; you respawn instantly and lose about two seconds. Of course, two seconds can be life-or-death in close races, but if you crash early in the race, you can definitely recover with strategic use of power-ups and boost as well as some fancy flying.
At any rate, yeah, this game is fun as hell. Now let’s tear it apart.
Console portitis
Welcome to the default world for PC games ported from consoles
Yep, here we go. The dreaded console portitis. This game was clearly developed for Xbox 360. The game defaults to Xbox 360 as a controller even if you don’t have one plugged in. It absolutely fails in that it does not allow mouse control, either. You’re stuck with pure keyboard play or a flight stick if you don’t have an Xbox 360 controller—and let me tell you right now, keyboard is just not an option. Therefore, you either need an Xbox 360 controller or a good flight stick. The game with a flight stick is a joy. I haven’t tried it on a 360 controller, but I imagine the analog stick is a fairly good control mechanism for this game as well. I have a Thrustmaster T.16000M and it recognized it and supported it out of the box, with one glaring exception: the throttle control was not supported, so keyboard W and S are still used for up and down throttle, which is awkward.
PC gamers are constantly reminded that the 360 controller is increasingly becoming the preferred control method for our games. That’s not a horrible thing; the 360 controller is really good. Still, mouse and keyboard control would have been perfectly acceptable for this game, and for some reason or another they just opted out. It’s kind of lame.
Heat effects and other graphic shinies
Multiplayer
I tried to get a multiplayer game going on the first night and failed miserably. I’ll chalk it up to the Skydrift servers being down, because I talked to another player over Steam and he couldn’t get it to work either.
After waiting a day, it worked. If you’re playing against skilled players, the game is way, way more intense than it is with the bots—though in all honesty the bots aren’t all that bad. The only thing this game lacks in a seriously bad way is local multiplayer. A LAN game with eight friends would be screamingly fun. Perhaps we can hope for local multiplayer in a patch.
There are, of course, leaderboards. You can compete with your friends in that sense too.
The $10 decision
As always, it boils down to one simple question: is this game worth my ten bucks?
If you have a 360 controller or a flight stick and you enjoy racing games or flying games, the answer is absolutely a resounding “yes”. Skydrift is intense, heart-pounding action with stellar graphics and enough variety to please even the most fickle gamer. It’s ten freaking dollars. Honestly, this game is worth more.
If you don’t have a 360 controller or a flight stick, skip this game. Sadly, because of the crappy keyboard-only controls, it would only be a frustratingly difficult experience for you. There’s just no room in this game for the lack of analog controls. At this point I’m saying we should probably all throw in the towel and buy a 360 controller for our PCs, as it’s just an inevitable tide.
See you in the skies!
Skydrift is available now on Steam for $9.95.
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