No sign of on-rails flight shooters for literally years, and then Wild Blue Skies and a Star Fox remake come along just a few months apart. Like buses. Or planes…whatever. Wild Blue Skies is the more compact indie offering when compared to the Nintendo flagship title, but it’s got the look and feel right straight out of the hangar. It’s time to lock and load with anthropomorphic pilots, again! Woof!

Kick The Tires And Light The Fires, Big Doggy

I’m going to start with gameplay here, because if I start with story or narrative we’ll be on the back foot. Wild Blue Skies has you flying over a multitude of passably fun terrains without needing to accelerate, as you are ‘on-rails’ in classic Starfox style. You just need to control aim, and dodging, and firing, and barrel rolls, and boosts, and a hundred other variables. Thank the animal gods they’ve seen fit to take acceleration off your plate.

Wild Blue Skies is built around a very arcade-style structure; complete six out of eleven levels in one run. The levels have high scores that can be achieved, but for the purposes of the first runs they just need to be survived. You have only three lives to make it through six levels and complete the game. Of course, if that were all there was, it would be pretty light on features, so the levels have a fair bit of replayability built in; find the collectibles, defend your teammates, get the level-maximum score, and don’t die. All these things will put you in better stead for the next level.

Structurally, I would have preferred more ability to stop and retry levels during a run or to level select to some extent, but if you actually want to retry a level mid-run, it’ll cost you a life; a trade-off I never wanted to make. Instead, you have to basically restart from the beginning, try to get those better scores on a full new run of the whole game. A bit frustrating from a modern outlook, but very in keeping with the heyday of this genre.

Flight controls are good, and the ship handles well; I especially enjoyed the quick banking move to get out of the way fast. Enemies can feel bullet-spongey at the very start, but it was rare they took much more than 3 shots, or maybe 6-7 for an armoured one. There’s a good amount of flying bullets to dodge, but I wasn’t impressed by my own arsenal – perhaps I’m ruined by shmups, but having only a super basic shot, and one slight upgrade and a cumbersome hold and release for groups was not enough. The planes are called bombers, and this hold-and-release mechanism the Blue Bombers have is more of a missile. I was expecting a bomb that fell to the ground to take out ground enemies, but there isn’t one.

You need to not get shot at all, because the state of your ship (or health bar) continues into the next level. And that goes for your teammates too. Teammates will fly past and need enemy chasers nipped off their tails. If you miss these opportunities to help, your teammates will fall in battle, and there’s a halfway permanent punishment for this – they can’t fly with you in the next level as they are out for repair.

But much like a red-carded footballer, this is only temporary, and they can rejoin you on the next level after that. It looks like, in theory, you have a progressively more difficult time the more of your shipmates fall in battle and need to be repaired, as they can’t come out in a pinch and help you. However, I didn’t really see evidence of this. Lose the lot, and you’re facing the bosses alone with no backup, but I couldn’t really tell if it was harder.

Dogfight

Let’s go back and tackle that narrative quickly. You play as 4x pilots, in particular an anthropomorphic dog named Bowie, (plus Roe (deer), Chuck (Bull), and Thorne (lizard?)) who need to defend their home from the evil forces of Grimclaw. This guy has no motive I could discern. There is no real plot apart from the next attack is at the next location of the next mission.

And Grimclaw attacked once before and was defeated and exiled by a previous generation of legendary bomber pilots. This extra detail is almost all you get, and it adds virtually nothing to the premise, except to wonder why they let him off back then with just exile, what his issue is, and why add this extra wrinkle if they weren’t going to link back to it, like it was Bowie’s father who fought in the previous war, or something at least.

The narrative establishes anthropomorphic characters, a virtually comic book evil villain, and an excuse to fly into the next level, but that’s about it. It probably could have been left on the cutting room floor entirely, as there’s an argument you don’t need a narrative for a shmup, so why here? But it feels like a missed opportunity, especially when compared to the personality of Starfox and his teammates. I made up more plot than there was in the game. What if Bowie’s father did die in that last war? What if Roe and Bowie have a thing going that gets in the way of their flying? Generic maybe, but anything would have been welcome.

Blue Sky Thinking

While the game looks and feels nice enough, there’s little to write home about here. Graphically its solid polygonal stuff in keeping with a Starfox64 vibe, just upgraded. Ships were a bit dull, and I never found any way to change or customise them. The music has a little collection of rousing battle tunes, but if they differed much from each other it was hard to tell. Nothing here stood out or made any impression.

Difficulty-wise, I’d say Wild Blue Skies was quite high. It’s hard to aim and dodge at once and hit everything you need to get a good score. It’s often very hard to save your teammates, and I was only really able to do this on replays when I knew when the right moment was coming. Damage is also really high, and you can only find a few scant health power-ups per level that make very little difference. Bowie can get taken out of the fight with a moment’s inattention, and then you have to restart the level, or single checkpoint, and try again. Even if you succeed, you take the damage you sustained into the next level. This can make getting through 6 levels in three lives a massive challenge. I appreciate this was a design choice, but it’s not one I enjoyed – I wanted to have my health reset for each mission, or at least some other structural options.

Black Hawk Down

Straight from the off, I didn’t appreciate the design choices made here. Invert is on as standard, which is not what I use. I was struggling to fire enough times in the short windows you get as enemies appear to destroy anything heavy. I had a quick search for a continuous fire option in the settings, and there it is. Suddenly the whole game is a few notches easier to progress in. If you are considering taking the pilot’s seat on this, make sure you toggle these immediately.

It also suffered from frame rate drops quite considerably on a few of the levels, making your jerky flying even more jerky and hard to follow. The levels where this occurred seemed pretty consistent, but that’s not really a point in its favour. I also found it was fairly blasé about enemy planes clipping structures. Of course I clip any terrain or enemies and it’s big damage and down I go, but the enemies themselves seem to be able to fly straight through each other. The third level has a mining drill in the centre that the enemy pilots just flew straight through to get away from you and a fair dogfight.

You Can Be My Wingman Any Time

I can only recommend Wild Blue Skies to those who either can’t get enough of the genre, and will therefore forgive the myriad shortcomings, or those who have never played Starfox before. Wild Blue Skies fails to be compelling, employs a selection of mechanics that sap the fun from the experience and leaves you not wanting to continue.

Making it as arcade-y as they have means that players are only really chasing better performance and scores, but if the story, characters, setting, plot, and sometimes even the gameplay are not worth it, then why would I keep coming back for the score-chasing?

Wild Blue Skies is available now on PlayStation 5 (review platform), Xbox Series S|X and PC via Steam, with a Nintendo Switch 2 version coming soon.

Developer: Chuhai Labs
Publisher: Balor Games

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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