Chopper Mike has players piloting a helicopter as they carefully maneuver through 48 obstacle courses. Ranging from an easy to an extreme difficulty, the goal of each course is to collect gems while attempting to accomplish three challenges (earned stars) per level by completing a course, beating a listed time and not hitting anything to have a perfect play-through. The completion and perfect challenges are rather easy outside of a few stages. However, it’s the time challenge that is, by far, the most difficult goal to accomplish, especially once beyond the easy difficulty levels.

The time limits to complete a course are insanely difficult and require a perfect run with the fastest helicopter. It can actually boggle a players mind when thinking about how quickly they need to collect the gems and how perfectly they need to fly through obstacles to complete the course. It’s a mighty difficult task and I think most will simply complete the stages by only collecting the first two stars before attempting time trial challenges.

With a very basic visual representation, players will deal with tight spaces as they carefully fly a chopper over and in-between blocks without trying to hit them. Hitting blocks will result in a time penalty and ruin the perfect challenge attempt. Also, to make things more difficult, there are moving blocks that players will need to precisely navigate through to collect the gem and get out while still having their perfect challenge attempt intact. It gets even crazier on extreme difficulty with red colored blocks that immediately fail the course if players hit them.

The gameplay feels really good and it’s easy to handle each aircraft with the virtual joystick and an ascend button. There are multiple choppers, one that is slow and allows a more steady gameplay experience when dealing with tough obstacles and another being much faster for challenging the top times. Players will also be able to unlock additional choppers as well.

Chopper Mike certainly provides a tough challenge when navigating through blocks, but something that makes it even more difficult is the camera angle and depth. There are moments when it is hard to tell the exact position of the chopper when dealing with a moving block and having no shadow of your aircraft below. It becomes slightly problematic when trying to get a sense of depth while avoiding those blocks. However, most of the time players are flying above blocks and will see a helicopter’s shadow showing their location in perspective to an upcoming obstacle.

Chopper Mike is fun for a fly-by but certainly doesn’t have enough appeal to entertain players for long. It only has a couple of interesting courses but nothing that will overly excite anyone.

Plasma-Sky is a top-down shooter with vibrant visuals and smooth gameplay and features 80 waves worth of levels with two different modes to compete in, Conquest and Hardcore. Conquest is the regular mode that provides players with health benefits and continues whereas Hardcore is, of course, a mode where one mistake and it’s game over. Both modes are perfectly fitting for this style of arcade shooter and will have players interested in both as they make their way through the game and up the leaderboards.

One wave at a time is the process of Plasma-Sky and each level features a good mix of enemies. Players will face enemies that are troublesome only because of their movements and the different angles that they come in from. Also, players will witness enemies armed with bullets and lasers, both providing unique shot patterns that must be avoided. Also, while blasting through space, players must watch out for incoming asteroids mixed in with gun turrets and must certainly be aware of the slithering snakes as they provide unique movements along with bullets of their own. There are plenty of more surprises along the journey with different enemy forces, patterns and even major boss battles to engage in.

Plasma-Sky is a progressive arcade game that is meant to be played numerous times for both learning purposes and high scores. On many occasions, players will reach a level for the first time and meet a boss or experience a new enemy pattern that will throw them through a loop and probably kill them multiple times before they learn their secrets. The game is difficult while learning every stage, but players will be able to discover all the secrets quickly while using continues in Conquest mode. Afterwards, they’ll be able to put forward a full-fledged attack on the leaderboards without having to deal with any surprises.

Players will beat Conquest mode in about 30 minutes of time. However, because of the game’s addictive nature, players will want to replay it multiple times, even if only for another play-through and not because they are motivated by the leaderboards. It’s a great joy to blast through each level while also shooting down special ships full of power-ups that give players wide-angle shots, lasers and a wing-man that can also have their shot upgraded. There is even a spike shield that players can use to ram enemy ships. That type of power-up will always be fun! Additionally, players will also need to collect dropped items from destroyed enemies to increase their shot power, something that decreases in time.

Plasma-Sky has a great balance in gameplay and a rewarding scoring system, especially for those who don’t take hits while playing conquest mode. The multiplier is simple and only takes time to increase but will reset when damage is taken. After the initial play-through and high score runs, I’m not sure how often players will come back to this game, but it’s absolutely worth experiencing at least once.