Wild Blue Skies Review

Instead of in space, Wild Blue Skies takes place in the air within the atmosphere of a single planet. Most levels are on-rails, guiding you toward the end and it’s up to you to blast what’s in your way or find ways around or through it. Sometimes with bosses or levels, you’ll have open levels in which you have more freedom of movement to navigate the arenas to complete the objectives. No matter the level, these often feel like recreations of the aforementioned Star Fox 64, something I’ll be reiterating ad nauseam.

The controls are fine, but borderline on bad. You can’t perform u-turns or loops, but you can barrel roll, so there’s that. Being a game that takes place in an atmosphere, applying the brakes means that you often lose altitude as a result. It’s a consequence of necessity when playing the game, but you’re punished for using it and can do more harm than good. And in the cases where you’re in an open area and want to turn around, performing these slow turns can be problematic. The decision to apply real-world logic to this game is offset by the fact that you’re using blasters, fighting mechanical creations, and is a cast made-up of anthropomorphic animals. It would have been better to give the player more mobility rather than less when compared to a game from 30 years ago.

For a shooter, the shooting feels bad almost all of the time. I was surprised that the default shooting pattern is a burst fire when pressing the X button. I was shocked to find that there’s actually a setting that makes shooting continuous, and by extension, far more enjoyable. It begs the question why it isn’t the default, especially when there’s no heat mechanic or limitation to the blasters. If you play well, you’ll acquire upgrades to the blasters that improve their effectiveness and reduce the time-to-kill with each one. These upgrades are lost when your health gets too low. There’s a dedicated button for firing off a charged shot, which also has homing properties – this took some getting used to. It’s a special kind of game to make the shooting feel this awkward.

Enemies often operate on-rails like your way through levels, as they have no life or variation. This is helpful when replaying levels or complete runs, as rote memorization is key. At the end of each stage is a boss for you to fight. The first boss is a cakewalk, where you have to exploit a weakness in his back armor. The second level’s boss is really easy after blasting away it’s tenticles, where it seemingly gives up and just lets you wail away on it until it is defeated. This is how it goes for most of the game, where enemies and bosses are frustrating and inconsistent that just sap the fun out of these encounters.

There’s no doubt that Wild Blue Skies has a great art style, opting for a vibrant cel-shaded look. I did find that the weather often gets in the way of truly jaw-dropping vistas. Whether by design or for performance is constricting its draw distances, is a disservice at how gorgeous the game can be at times. All that said, I was able to get the game to reach max framerate for my monitor at 180fps without so much as it breaking a sweat.

I’m someone that has no real nostalgia or love for Star Fox 64, but Wild Blue Skies is such a pale imitation of that game. This is especially true when a fully remade Star Fox just got released two months ago, it’s hard to find any reason to play this over that. There’s also other games that have done this better that doesn’t have enemy clipping through environments, abysmal enemy AI, lack of mobility, and underwhelming shooting mechanics. Wild Blue Skies is perfunctory and so bereft of originality, it never dares to be a maverick and exist as something wholly unique.