There Are No Incompetent Wingmen On This Flight

It's rare, but Amazon does occasionally recommend something I'm intrigued by, such as Sky Odyssey. I do like flight games, and here was one I'd never heard of. I looked up a review of it, and was impressed enough by said review to order it. The review said there were two potential stumbling blocks: The graphics and the steep learning curve. Graphics don't usually matter much to me as long as they don't make the game look broken (you can jduge for yourself, the image is pretty typical), and as far the steep learning curve, they weren't kidding.

Sky Odyssey is a little different than any other flight game I've ever owned because it's not air combat. The story is that somewhere on Destin Island is the Tower of Maximus, and within it, the city of Eden. How they know this I'm not sure, since no one who set out to reach it has ever returned, and it's shrouded in clouds that would make spotting it from the air impossible. Satellite imagery, I suppose. The point is only the bravest and best pilot could reach the fabled land, and that, apparently, is me (or you, if you're playing). So the game is a series of missions where the pilot flies from place to place among the four islands (of which Destin is one), seeking ruins which will provide clues to the location of Maximus.

There's a lot of flying through ravines and caves, and dodging falling rocks is a common occurrence. There are other missions thrown I think just to change things up. One mission involves dropping supplies to various base camps, another requires you to refuel from a moving train because your plane sprang a leak, and you don't have enough fuel to make it otherwise. That's actually the second mission in the game. That was a pain. You'll fly through forests, over active lava vents, amongst powerful thunderclouds, the developers threw about every natural phenomenon they could think of at you, probably to compensate for the lack of any intelligent opposition. There's no rival trying to sabotage you, or ancient sect to keep you away, just you trying to make it through the levels.

In a lot of ways, Sky Odyssey feels like an older game, where certain things have to be done just so if the level is to be beaten. It can be frustrating, maddeningly so, but I was always excited and relieved whenever I could beat a level, especially if I could manage a good grade in the process. They assign you a letter grade after each level, based on the time it took you, the number of checkpoints you passed through, and how many acrobatic points were accumulated (I'm usually too busy struggling to stay alive to worry about acrobatic points). The checkpoints are a nuisance though, since they don't act like checkpoints in most games. If you die, you don't restart from the last checkpoint, you restart from the beginning of the level, which can get tedious if there's one particular point that keeps tripping you up, and you have to keep flying 9 minutes before you can try it again*.

If you make it through a level with a "B" or better, you can select parts to add to your aircraft, but only once per level. So you can't get a new engine for the Swordfish biplane, then replay the level with the Me-109 and get a new cockpit. They do let you mess around with the color schemes, and there's a limited design function where you can create new emblems for your planes. I made a sad panda face.

There are a couple of other modes, including target mode, where you try to fly through targets in a set amount of time, and Sky Canvas, which has you flying through rings to make pictures. I made a very nice face, but my infinity symbol needs some work. The controls are not my favorites. The game seems to want you to use the PS2 directional pad (though it may just be a matter of hitting the analog button to use the joysticks). There's a second set of controls, but neither the instruction booklet, nor the tutorial will tell you what they are, so they really want you to use the default settings. I got used to the D-pad, but I wouldn't say I was ever proficient with it. No doubt there were numerous cool-looking near misses that took place solely because I was having trouble diving and turning simultaneously.

* My example would be the level where almost as soon as I left a ruin, my engine caught on fire, and I had to try and float downriver on the pontoons attached to my plane. Keep in mind, this was the first level the pontoons had been used, so I was still adjusting to how the affected the aircraft. For the record, pontoons slow down the plane, make takeoffs take longer, and makes it hard to tilt the plane on its side, as the weight of the pontoons keeps trying to bring the plane upright again.