Shooty Skies Review

Developer: Mighty Games
Price: FREE
Version Reviewed: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPhone 5

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Ever since Crossy Road hit the App Store there have been a lot of other games being inspired by Hipster Whale's endless Frogger-like, and a lot of talk about its style and structure. Some of that talk has specifically been about the potential of taking other classics and making them and endless free-to-play game.

In looking at Shooty Skies, two thirds of the Crossy Road folks took inspriation from this chatter to make and endless shoot-em-up game very much in that style. While it does a fantastic job of capturing the same compelling gameplay loop, Shooty Skies does feel like a bit of an also-ran just because of how little it does to push this style forward.

Playing Shooty Skies is as simple as touching and dragging a finger across the screen to move the player character plane around and shoot. Letting go of the screen allows players to charge up a powerful missle shot, though this obviously prevents them from dodging bullets or enemies.

As players dodge bullets and destroy enemy computer monitors, arcade cabinets, and other strange objects, they will gather power-ups and face off against bosses until they inevitably get hit and have their run ended. From there coins and distance are totaled up, which put players that much closer to unlocking a random new plane. Like Crossy Road, unlocking new planes doesn't really change the gameplay too much but they do offer some aesthetic changes that help to keep things feeling fresh.

Also like Crossy Road, Shooty Skies is remarkably fair as a free-to-play game. Players can elect to watch ads to get coins or can spend some cash to unlock new planes directly. Other than that they won't encounter any obnoxious ad placements or cooldown timers, which is all well and good - though completely expected.

Shooty Skies is so much like Crossy Road that it's kind of hard to get particularly excited about. Players that would much prefer a shoot-em-up over Froggercan have some fun with it, but there's not much else going on in it that pushes this type of game foward in interesting ways. This isn't to say that Shooty Skies isn't fun or good, but its overall structure just isn't as remarkable this time around.