Sky Gamblers: Cold War Review

I admit to not having spent much time playing the Sky Gamblers series. I've never been a huge fan of airplane warfare games, and I don't think that the real world is a fan of the actual thing - has there been an actual aerial dogfight in the past few decades? I hope not, because war is bad! But yet, aerial dogfighting winds up popping up commonly in games. So when duty called, I decided to give Sky Gamblers: Cold War a shot, and I can see the appeal. This is aerial warfare that's got a light learning curve to it.

Sky Gamblers: Cold War does the one thing that I think every other online multiplayer game needs to have at their main menu: a quick start button! This promotes quick, casual online play by making it super-simple to jump in. There's still options for creating games (including private matches with Game Center friends), but this subtle little feature goes a long way toward ensuring that people will actually play a game with online multiplayer! I found matches even in the dead of night.

The online gameplay worked very well over a decently-fast cellular connection, too. While there's a wide variety of modes, I found objective-based ones like destroying bases to be the most fun because I wasn't always the target! Thankfully the title isn't set up to be abusively pay-to-win - it's possible to pay to unlock customization options and to just unlock all planes that can be unlocked through normal gameplay.

There's singleplayer gameplay as well, though it all largely consists of a 12-level campaign mode, survival battles, and bot-filled versions of the multiplayer modes. Multiplayer is the real backbone of the experience. However they do earn experience points for unlocks, so hey. The graphics are also top-notch, with impressive draw distance on the iPhone 5.

The accelerometer controls that are set up by default are not to my preference, though they do make controlling speed along with firing weapons to be quite easy. I prefer the virtual joystick, though for whatever reason inverted controls aren't enabled by default. I think inverted controls in FPS are downright Orwellian, but inverted flight controls are perfectly fine because that's how real planes are. Of course I also prefer external plane views, so don't take my opinion on this for what it is. But I do get annoyed that control settings are only permanently set outside of a game session.