Review: Sky Racer / Sky Striker
Score:
70%
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You know, having said for years that what the world needs is a really good flight simulator for handhelds and smartphones, it's only after reviewing this duo of new games that I've realised why noone's really bothered before, at least on the current generation of smartphones. Which isn't to say that Sky Racer and Sky Striker aren't any good - they're both well worth the purchase price to have fun mastering the controls and to have the pleasure of virtual flying in the privacy of your own smartphone - but ultimately there's only so much you can display on a tiny (in this case 176 by 208 pixel) screen and flight simulators are notorious for needing as much display real estate as possible.
Sky Racer is set in the world of aerial acrobatics, in which you have to fly through as many floating hoops as possible, arranged in a variety of formations, to earn points while Sky Striker is set in a ground-attack Eastern Europe scenario, with you having to blow up certain targets in order to progress. In fact, there's a third title, Coast Guard, set in a similar ground-attack role but with much of the action taking place over water. The controls and feel of the flight simulation game are very similar in each case, which is why I chose to review two of the titles together.
In each case, there's a front 'game' menu, followed by a mission brief and then selection of your aircraft. There are lengthy five second delays between these screens (and between aircraft), presumably to load up the 3D-rendered aircraft models - frustrating, but the models are quite pretty and spin round happily.
Once underway, joystick control is via the navigator key, of course, with thrust, external views, HUD, weapon selection and map mode all assigned to numbers on the keypad. This works well enough though it does take a while to remember which button does what.
Frame rate within the 3D sim world is good, considering the texture-mapped ground and hills, though there are the usual flight sim developer tricks of a mist that often obscures the middle to far distance and very little ground object detail. For Sky Racer, your focus is in the sky though, and it can be both fun and challenging to try and make it through every hoop. For Sky Striker, the aim is to locate your target, select a ground attack missile and then hope that the right target is locked on - there's no manual target cycling here and weapons lock to whatever's centremost in the windscreen. Having fired, the mission is immediately cut short with a view of whatever you've destroyed, rightly or wrongly (e.g. a civil building).
In Sky Striker, even turning on HUD detail doesn't really give enough information to do the job in hand, and niceties such as compass bearing and confirmation of what you're locked onto are badly missed - it's far too easy to think you're locked onto a radar site and realise too late that it's a government building. This is where a larger display would come into its own, I suspect. Hopefully Warelex can tweak the game and add extra viewing windows for a proper S60 3rd Edition version, on the 320 by 240 and 352 by 288 pixel displays. I did find the screenshot on the right on the Warelex site, giving a glimpse of the game running at the higher resolution.
These are flawed games, it's true, but much of the blame is simply down to the limitations of the form factor of the device they're running on. Even taking into account some of the negatives, I'd still recommend choosing your scenario and then playing with at least one of the games, to see what can be done, graphically, on S60 devices. The fact that all three games are currently only available for 'old' smartphones likes the 6630 and N70 is a bit of a black mark but here again there's the countering positive that the developers are actively porting to S60 3rd Edition as I write this.
At worst, these are a good graphical demo. At best, they're prototypes of some really kick-a** flight simulations yet to come for larger screened smartphones such as the Nokia E61 and N73. Kudos to Warelex and more power to their keyboards...
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at