Skyfighter Arcade

There's a lot to like in this little indie shmup, but unfortunately there's more that's wrong with it at the moment. - The controls are incredibly twitchy and seem to have some kind of momentum system that's hard to figure out. This is the biggest negative. Every good shmup from day 1 gave you tight control over your ship so you can dance around bullets. It's like a driving game with bad driving physics, it's the most fundamental element. You'd think that upgrading your ship might give you better control, but nope. Who knows what that does. Ship control needs to be tighter, period. - Cardinal sin #2, it's not a score based system. You just play for the sake of upgrading your ship. That's fine and all but scores are crucial for this genre and anything that would consider itself an arcade styled game. - There are these weird scaffolds all over the map that you can't destroy but they can destroy you, and they're just ugly. They need to be destroyable at the least. - The developers claim the game has full joystick support throughout, but this isn't true. There are lots of items in the menu and upgrade screens that you simply can't get to with your joystick and you'll need your mouse. It sounds like I hate the game but there's some solid elements here like sound fx, the upgrade system, and the vector-ish graphics are fun. It's close to a good game! But at the very least the ship needs to be slower/tighter, and and there needs to be some reason to play other than upgrading your ship (hint: high scores!). 6/10

A lot of potential but unfortunately as it stands it's not much fun at all. It's an endless survivors style game (a genre I really dislike to begin with) but there's not even a score to compete for or leaderboards of any kind. The music is the same short loop the ENTIRE game and after just my 45 minutes I had a headache. It desperately needs say a 7 stage campaign and some music variety. Even if the above was fixed, the control is wrong. There is analog control however the intertia is "off" and if you use digital control (the d pad isn't supported, another big no no, but I got around it by using my M30 with the d pad assigned to left analog stick) then it's so fast it's barely controllable. Actually it's not so much the speed, cause other shmups have speed ups, it's that the control just isn't tight. A good shmup means you can literally get close to bullets and dodge with precision and in this game I am fighting the controls just to avoid the big stage obstacles all over the place. Hold it a millisecond too long and you go straight into a bullet or crash. Trying to even line up up shots is an exercise in patience indeed. The best way I can think to descroibe it more simply is that you are constantly over and under correcting rather than feel you have precise control over the ship at any time. The main good point is that there are 4 weapon slots and you can upgrade each weapon and there are a large variety of them ( I don't know to what level, I got to weapons Level 4 when I gave up). Oh btw, controller is not working properly in menus and on initial game launch doesn't work at all till you are in game. After you start a game it works in menus to start a game again and exit, however the weapons system needs scrolling with the mouse to see all, so it's not implemented properly. I feel bad refunding it but I didn't have fun and I don't want to play it again in its current state. If it gets fixed I will give it another go and change the review if it's genuine positive changes.