It’s a good mix for getting adjusted to the game, with missiles for air-to-air, rockets for big stationary targets, and the gun for finishing things off.Įach mission is randomly-generated, launching you from an aerial aircraft carrier into the skies above a suspiciously hex-tiled archipelago. Your plane can load up to 4 weapons as long as they don’t exceed the weight or aeronautics limits for that aircraft, and the starter plane comes with a vulcan cannon, homing micro missiles, and dumb-fire rockets. On a gamepad with sim controls it flies like a dream, allowing for careful dogfights and close-range gun kills. Sky Rogue controls with either keyboard & mouse or a gamepad, and you can set it to simple controls where left and right turn or sim controls where they only roll the plane. If you can make it all the way to the thirteenth sortie, you’ll find just what the opposition has been cooking up for you. Scoring kills nets you currency for upgrades and research for meta-game unlocks, so it’s a good idea to hang around the mission area notching targets if you can. Mission targets range from command centers and laboratories to squadrons of transport planes and bombers to massive sky fortresses, all accompanied by fighter craft and defense emplacements.
You’ve been put on a series of missions to take down key opposition targets on your way to some nebulous secret weapon that could spell doom for your faction. The only lore you’re going to get in this one is by digging into the in-game Wiki entries for planes and weapons, so don’t concern yourself with it too much. It doesn’t quite meet that lofty goal, and its got some rough edges, but the simple, beautiful core of the experience makes for some great action while it lasts. Flight sims aren’t a huge market and arcade sims an even smaller portion of that, so the potential for games like Sky Rogue to offer endless replayability in such spaces is terribly exciting. They won’t all be good, they won’t all realize their potential, but they’ll breathe a special form of life into genres that can fade at times. Learn more on our Patreon page.Įventually there will be roguelike mash-ups of every other genre in gaming, and I welcome this procedurally-generated future.
This game was selected as one of our two June 2019 Reader’s Choice Reviews.