Skyfighter Arcade Reviews

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