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PS2 Sky Gunner Developer: Atlus | Publisher: Pixel Arts
Rating: B+Reno
Type: Shooter Skill Level: Intermediate
Players: 1 Available: Now

Sky Gunner, developed by Japanese developer Pixel Arts and published by Atlus attempts to be a shoutout to the good ol' shooters of yore: A game that combines amazing 3D graphics and classic "shmups" (as many gaming enthusiasts call shooters) gameplay for a package that's far too tempting for any fan of the genre to resist picking up.

The story revolves around the town of Rive, who are celebrating the creation of the Eternal Engine - a perpetual battery that needs no maintenance and can power a machine infinitely. During their celebration, the nefarious Ventre shows up with his army of Poulets and steals the Eternal Machine. Now it is up to three "Sky Gunners" - Ciel, Femme and Copain - to take it back and bring down Ventre.

Sky Gunner let's you start off with two playable characters: Ciel and Femme, with Copain available shortly afterwards. Each character in the game follows their own storyline, which branches off in several places. When our trio does group together to defeat whatever invention Ventre has up his sleeve, everyone is assigned a different mission objective to complete, which obviously adds a whole lot of replay to the game. In one part of the game, Ciel must take out an enemy pilot by himself, and then in the next mission he'll team up with Femme and Copain to take out a large enemy warship.

Your mission can end prematurely in two ways: if you've taken too much damage from enemy fire or if you run out of fuel. When you've taken a certain amount of damage, you will lose control of your aircraft and it will start spiralling downwards with a timer telling you how long until you crash. Here you can mash on the control pad to regain control of your craft, but do this too many times and you may not have enough time to get back to safety. Running out of fuel is a much bigger problem, especially on missions that tend to have a lot of missions objectives or where you want to boost your score. In fact your score has a big effect in the actual game, and is not merely a statistic. Some missions incorporate it into their bonus objectives, where you will be able to gain a new type of engine for your craft. The way the scoring system works is that you get points for destroying enemies, but you also lose points for using up your ammunition as well as when you lose control of your craft. You can also gain a lot of points via multipliers, when you destroy one target, which will cause a chain reaction and destroy other targets nearby.

The basic mechanics of the game are simple to get down: you have your infinite ammo machine gun as well as four types of secondary attacks: Fireworks, Dog and Cross missiles as well as Pumpkin bombs. Fireworks missiles have a huge blast radius, which gives them the ability to take out large numbers of enemy fighters. Dog missiles are great for slowing down fast enemies, but do no damage to them. Cross missiles actually dig into your target and are detonated when you shoot them, and Pumpkin bombs are your weapon of choice when you prefer the "death from above" strategy. In addition to these items, each character in the game possesses their own unique move which you can use so long as your engine does not overheat. While many of these moves (such as Femme's Quick Turn) are very useful, others such as Ciel's Air Brakes/Heavy Guns don't do much to help your success. In fact, Ciel himself has a very weak special skill compared to the other characters in the game, which makes him extremely hard to play as, despite his "normal difficulty" label.

The controls are also a little questionable. While the Novice settings are for most people perfect, one has to wonder why anyone would want to use the Expert controller settings, which makes the game almost impossible to play. Similarily, the Novice targetting system is also adequate, while the Expert system is not. Despite these minor shortcomings, overall the game is very fun to play and will definitely challenge even the best of players. At first you might think it's a bit short with only a handful of missions available, but once you restart the game with a different character, you'll realize just how differently each character plays, and how different their missions really are. Not only that, but there are tons of unlockable options to find in the game, depending on how good you perform in the game. In total there are 3 unlockable characters in addition to the first two that you start off with, not to mention a stage select, a mode to view all of the cutscenes in the game, and the traditional Survival and Time Attack modes.

Graphically the game is splendid, combining great 3D designs and pyrotechnic effects with beautiful hand-drawn 2D artwork during cutscenes. The cutscenes are definitely one of a kind, overlaying the artwork with real-time graphics for a look that's completely unique. The actual in-game graphics are simplistic, but they certainly do their job well. The overall theme of the game is basically a throwback to the mid-1900s, where biplanes and zepplins ruled the skies. The action is always intense, with dozens upon dozens of enemy fighters converging on their targets at all times, buzzing around and firing their weapons.

Unfortunately all of this frentic action comes at a cost, as the game experiences a lot of slow down during many of the latter stages in the game. However, Atlus USA has implemented a mode called Uniform Processing (enabled by pressing Up, Triangle, Left, Circle, Down, X, Right, Square at the title screen), which gets rid of this pesky slowdown problem by sacrificing some visual quality as well as dropping the framerate down to 30fps. Obviously there will be some people who view this as a cheap way to get around the slowdown problem, but I must applaud Atlus USA for giving gamers a choice in the matter, since this mode isn't available in the Japanese version.

Atlus also does right in the sound department by going with a DVD format for Sky Gunner instead of the Japanese version's CD format in order to squeeze both the English and Japanese voiceovers into the game. Needless to say, both the English and the Japanese voiceovers are very good, although the one shortcoming here are the odd pauses of silence between each line of dialogue. The voices for the Poulets (the henchmen of Ventre) are very comedic, especially in the English version, where they often speak like 5 year old kids. The tracks in the game are really bright and uplifting, giving the game a "flying in the wild blue yonder" type of deal going on.

While the genre may not be as popular as fighters or RPGs, shoot-em-ups are still innovating and retaining the same fun factor that seems to have been lost in many other games. With some unique graphics, gameplay that mixes some old and some new elements together and a bevy of unlockable secrets, Sky Gunner shouldn't be missed by anyone who wants to enjoy a fun-filled, light-hearted action game just one more time.

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Rating: B+Reno
Graphics: 7 Sound: 8
Gameplay: 8 Replay: 7
  © 2002 The Next Level