Sky To Fly: Faster Than Wind

I went in hoping for a breezy, arcade-flavoured palette cleanser between bigger games, and Sky to Fly mostly delivers on that narrow brief. You pilot an airship captain defending the floating city of Windopolis against a pirate gang led by the wonderfully named Red Beard, weaving left and right through 20-plus levels packed with enemy airships, flying fish, and tiny drifting houses. Controls are exactly two inputs: left, right, and a cannon ability with an eight-second cooldown. That is the whole mechanical vocabulary. On a gamepad it feels like a mobile touchscreen translated badly to thumbsticks, and on keyboard it is two arrow keys doing all the heavy lifting. If you were hoping to feel like an ace airship pilot, you will be mildly disappointed. The upgrade loop is where the game finds a bit of traction. You collect gears and crystals as in-run currency, use them to buy faster and tougher airships, and hire crew members who each bring different passive perks, things like armour boosts, coin multipliers, or improved durability. Mixing and matching your crew is genuinely the most interesting decision space in the game. There is also a two-currency system that screams free-to-play mobile roots loudly, though the PC version has no actual microtransactions baked in, so the grind is annoying but not predatory. The biggest complaint from players and reviewers alike lands on pace. Despite the title promising wind-breaking speed, the airship trudges at a leisurely clip even when fully upgraded. The sensation of genuine momentum never arrives. A handful of missions add timed objectives to mix things up, but most just ask you to reach a checkpoint intact. Enemy variety is thin, and the hard difficulty mode is locked behind completing easy mode first, which means anyone looking for a challenge has to sit through several hours of low-stakes autopilot before the game takes the training wheels off. Where it earns some goodwill is in its art direction and audio. The steampunk aesthetic is bright and cohesive, all brass fittings, floating archipelagos, and chunky Victorian machinery. The soundtrack is legitimately decent for a budget title. The story, adapted from the mobile original, is light and breezy with a colourful enough cast to stop the narrative feeling completely throwaway. The whole thing clocks in at roughly three to four hours for the main story, with side missions adding a little padding. Solo only, no local multiplayer, no co-op, so the Saturday night group session crowd should look elsewhere entirely. As a relaxed solo wind-down experience for someone who just wants to switch their brain off and click through something visually pleasant, it does its job without embarrassing itself. As a PC runner competing against the likes of Jet Set Radio or even genre peers on Steam with actual depth, it falls short on ambition. Know what you are buying: a short, calm, mobile-heritage runner with a charming skin and a very shallow pool. Riley, Scout Team

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