Red Barton and The Sky Pirates

Don't buy this game. I'm glad I didn't. (To be clear, I didn't receive it "for free", I got the key in a bundle that wasn't humble.) The developer has taken "early retirement", they say they "tried", they "really did". I honestly wonder if anyone in their team did actually try playing this game. WHO ON EARTH thought "Yeah, THIS is FUN!" AND gave that feedback to the developers? There is no story except for some poor dialogue early on, which is just text on the screen. The character art seems to be from a number of different places: none of it matches, and "Red Barton" doesn't look anything like the Steam banner image. The leader of the Sky Pirates I think says something like "Go get 'em!" at the beginning of the first level, and then that's the sky pirates done. For gameplay, if you can call it that, there is an aiming reticule. It remains in the centre of the screen, and you have to (clunkily) guide the aircraft such that the reticule is over the enemy you want to shoot at. Handily, you can keep shooting at the enemy even when your plane is crashing. You don't have any chance of hitting any enemies until you're quite close to them. Even then, many are behind scenery objects and they are all able to fire in directions other than directly in front of them, giving them a significantly unfair advantage. They'll also fire at you when you've passed them. Some enemies are far enough off to the left or right of what I'll call the "playable area" - which has no visible border - that you'll take damage by simply trying to aim at them. The first two levels require several play-throughs to get enough of the in-game currency to upgrade the aircraft / weapons enough to make it to the end of the 2nd level - unless you're really good at dodging missiles. The first end level boss is defeatable by simply holding down the left or right arrow and firing. The second... well, it's surrounded by submarines which I couldn't reliably hit, and I couldn't find anywhere on the enemy where it would take damage. I also somehow glitched closer to the enemy, and the whole thing became impossible. That's when I quit and uninstalled this absolute pile of garbage. If the studio was still running, I would be tempted to send them a bill for the 36 minutes I spent giving it some kind of chance. Don't buy this even for a penny. It is absolute trash.

https://youtu.be/swDmn8Qna34 A general stiffness in controls will push away many players. Combined with a punishing power curve makes early combat feel pointless, especially with trivial boss design.