Who's that Flying?!

Who's that Flying?! is a horizontal shoot-em-up from Mediatonic that runs on a single clever conceit: you are the Guardian of Earth, an all-powerful protector with a hyper-powered laser arm, and something has gone wrong. Monsters are reaching the city behind you. After each wave, the game demands you identify which enemy broke through your defenses. Get it wrong and you face consequences. That loop - blast everything, then point the finger at the culprit - gives what could have been a forgettable budget shmup a surprisingly tense identity. The core shooting is simple by design. You scroll through waves of alien creatures, laser arm blazing, and the action never tries to be a Touhou-level bullet ballet. Patterns are readable, enemy types are visually distinct enough to matter during the accusation phase, and the whole thing moves at a brisk, almost breezy pace. That accusation mechanic is genuinely the star here. It trains you to stay aware even when your instinct is to go full autopilot on mobs. There is a small but real satisfaction when you correctly tag the one creature that slipped your notice, like a memory game wrapped inside an arcade cabinet. Where the game struggles is depth and longevity. The content is thin. Levels cycle through a limited set of backdrops and enemy mixes, and the novelty of the whodunit hook starts to flatten after an hour or two. There is no build variety, no unlockable loadout, nothing that meaningfully shifts how you approach a run. The art has personality - chunky, slightly campy creature designs that lean into the Saturday-morning-cartoon apocalypse tone - but the overall package feels like a prototype for a bigger idea that never quite arrived. For a game released in the early indie Steam era, that was more forgivable. Revisiting it now, the seams show. The audience for this is pretty specific: people who enjoy compact, low-pressure arcade sessions and appreciate a mechanic twist that at least tries something different. If you want a shmup with mechanical depth, weapon systems, or score-chasing that evolves over dozens of runs, look elsewhere. But if you have an hour and a soft spot for oddly charming Kalypso-era indie curios with a gimmick that genuinely works on its own terms, Who's that Flying?! earns its runtime without overstaying its welcome. It knows what it is, mostly, and that counts for something.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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