A friend turned me onto this F2P shmup over the weekend. I played a couple rounds and a few things occurred to me:
The core gameplay is slave to the progression system:
Your ship is simply not satisfying to control and the visual-gameplay feedback of shooting your default pea-shooter gun is horrible. The experience will probably improve with upgrades but they've set players too far down the ladder to hook them into playing more.
I see some potential with their monetization model
Stars collected during missions go towards buying upgrades to your ship. Each upgrade takes longer to activate than the last and there is a very long track of unique upgrades as well as upgrade levels. There will be a fair bit of grinding and each mission will have a small set of achievements (i.e. kill all enemies, don't take any damage) to encourage replays.
The presentation is quite clean and again I think there's potential for an addictive experience but the core "feel" of play is just so gimped. I don't feel like sticking around to see how it gets better after a couple dozen upgrades.
I sort of hate myself for liking games with progression systems similar to what you described here. But I can't help it. The grind is fun for me. I think a big part of the reason is that it allows one to play more 'casually' (read: under the influence) and still come away with a feeling of progress.
That being said, never played this and probably won't considering my phone's full of other (quality) shmups that I don't play.
The control sucks as you mentioned. Instead of using the Cave style and letting you press anywhere and having that be the center point, it will usually gravitate the ship toward where you press, so it's unnaturally wonky and you often have your finger covering up the ship so you can't see it well to dodge. They learned nothing from bullet hell hitboxes so you get your ass handed to you if you play it like modern shooters and the firing is boring. I think its success is among players who haven't been into the genre since 1942 came out. It needs a lot of work.
I haven't tried this one yet, but if this post is accurate:
Muchi Muchi Spork wrote:The control sucks as you mentioned. Instead of using the Cave style and letting you press anywhere and having that be the center point, it will usually gravitate the ship toward where you press, so it's unnaturally wonky and you often have your finger covering up the ship so you can't see it well to dodge.
There are much much better shmups on iOS/Android to try.
Patashu wrote:I haven't tried this one yet, but if this post is accurate:
Muchi Muchi Spork wrote:The control sucks as you mentioned. Instead of using the Cave style and letting you press anywhere and having that be the center point, it will usually gravitate the ship toward where you press, so it's unnaturally wonky and you often have your finger covering up the ship so you can't see it well to dodge.
There are much much better shmups on iOS/Android to try.
That already sounds yuck.
While i agree that starting down the ladder is not a good thing, the thing about the control, while is not as smooth as for example DDP DFK, it actually can do really good. You just have to go inside the options and chnge the control scheme.
Regards.
SuperPang wrote:Where DOJ rapes you, DFK grabs your boob then runs away.
I play Sky Force 2014 as much as I can. It's a great game. The progression can be sped up if you buy the coin doubler in the game $1.99usd. I've spent a total of $10 bucks on the game. I purchased the ad remover the coin doubler and 2x 5000 coins.
The game is very grindy at first. Once you get into the game it's very challenging and satisfying. Plays great on an iPad 2 and an iPhone 5s. Another cool feature is every weekend there are tournaments so you can compete for high scores with friends who are also playing the game.
The only problem I have with the game so far is that stage 8 is locked. Not sure if the game is finished or not but as of now there are only 7 stages. Each stage has a normal, hard and insane difficulty.
If anyone here is playing it and wants to add me to gamecenter....add me. Knockworstface
nah, it's just like eating candy, for me it's just equal to easy difficult of Raiden IV...lol! the enemy bullet patterns still travel too slow, the slow-motion weapon mini-menu selection kinda screwed up the fight (try to bring first person shooter effect into shmup game is really a very bad idea)
awesome colorful shiny graphic and catchy 8bit-ish soundtrack
sky force series has my respect as my favourite, but it just stay with casual.....it's euroshmup after all!
I never played the Mobile version, but I have SkyForce Anniversary on Steam and I really like it.
I play it with the Xbox 360 wireless controller and works great.
I consider Skyforce Anniversary a fun and relaxing shmup, great for unwinding after a busy day of work. The upgrade system is interesting and rewarding, encouraging you to continue playing to update the various parts of the ship.
nah, it's just like eating candy, for me it's just equal to easy difficult of Raiden IV...lol! the enemy bullet patterns still travel too slow, the slow-motion weapon mini-menu selection kinda screwed up the fight (try to bring first person shooter effect into shmup game is really a very bad idea)
awesome colorful shiny graphic and catchy 8bit-ish soundtrack
sky force series has my respect as my favourite, but it just stay with casual.....it's euroshmup after all!
Skyforce Reloaded [which is shown in the video] is coming to Steam in the near future
Skyforce Anniversary is out now for Vita/PS3/PS4/XB1/Steam/mobile
if you can get through the boring grind at the start is a great non-bullet hell shooter. i like it so much i brought it three times
