Sky Diving review (PlayStation 3)

A new game for £3.49. Who would have ever thought it before this generation of consoles? Well that’s the world we’re living in now with experimental shorter titles being pumped straight into your console without leaving the living room. Sky Diving (we can’t get over the originality of the title either) fits the bill nicely. A cheap quick to download simple bit of gameplay purity to fill the time between the AAA titles and waiting for Rock Band. Sony definitely seesm to be encouraging innovation with its PSN releases and while we’ve seen something similar already, the another use of the Sixaxis tilt and motion sensitive controls can hardly be ignored.

There is no story, it is simply a case of hurling yourself out of a fast moving object, thousands of feet above the ground and either performing stylish dubiously titled formations with your four person crew, or showing some acrobatic flair on your own in the hope that you can land on a 20ft target on the ground below, all trying to score as many points or formations as possible.

Formation

That’s right; there are two mini-games in this mini-game (that incidentally wouldn’t have seemed out of place in something like Final Fantasy VII). The first gives you control of the overall positioning of your character much like flOw in its tilty movey fluid style, and while you’re moving, you can turn your controller, with a sharp enough move that it spins your character around. Finally, you can push the L1 or R1 buttons to use the relevant hand to grab onto one of your teammates and complete the formation.

As the game starts, it will flash up the next arrangement you are going to try, with your position highlighted in red. It is then your objective to get into that position as fast as possible, and while your team manage almost immediately, the orientation of your character seems to be the stumbling block of the whole performance. Sometimes you will not need to grab on, but the majority of the time you’ll be tilting and twisting your controller hammering the buttons just in a hope of being in the right location to allow continuation to the next on the list and therefore the most formations possible.

Exactly what it says on the tin

The Landing mode, rather than being focussed on the number of formations before having to pull your parachute cord is all about the points achieved from spinning mid air in your fall, having combinations of complicated procedures gained by moving the twisting the controller and holding L1 and R1. The real fun begins when you throw the controller up to open your chute (gaining bravery points for how late you open it). You’ll see the target with distance and altitude all given to you and must aim to land (strangely through pulling down on the L and R sticks rather than the only minimal controller tilting)

After gliding along the ground for a while, you can hit R1 to plant your feet for accuracy, and a slow motion close up shows your final hit. The difficulty seems to swing between relative ease of landing and insane last minute out of control moments. Either way, it’s a nice overall game type.

Different… Formations?

Each mode can be progressed through in ‘License’ mode that gives you a few challenges to unlock new stages and the challenges themselves in other modes, though remain quite light on variety, simply upping the number of formations to create or increasing the score needed in a successful landing. The difficulty seems to ramp up high though, with newcomers managing all but the higher levels that remain just out of reach for even the expert players. The License mode also gives you your training from an ‘interestingly’ designed (read big and fat) ‘Captain Rainbow’ and a pause and inform dynamic to the tutorial that you’re gonna hope to pick up enough from the first time that you don’t have to watch it again.

Further instructions can be found in the manual from the main menu which is read online through a web browser. Then there’s an offline and an online mode. Offline is clearly designed as a local multiplayer for formation mode that lets you either compete against a friend, each taking a team, or join up with three other friends and create the formations all yourselves (much more challenging). It’ll also let you practise on a wind machine to avoid time pressures and just choose from the stages and times you’ve unlocked. Then there’s the Landing version which is literally a replay of the License levels you’ve unlocked.

The obligatory online multiplayer (we’re not complaining)

The online portion of the Landing mode is literally replaying the three landings in the previous mode but with your score recorded online in the hope to claim the top spot on the leaderboards. Formation becomes interesting again by giving you the same options as offline modes, but with other people that are willing to play the game with you, assuming you can find them. (It’s definitely not the most populated of games online at the moment).

While this is replicated on the local multiplayer, power ups become available that you float over to collect to help your own score or hinder your opponents by not showing the ‘ghost’ formation to help; are you supposed to remember them all? Once you’re done with a game in any mode you can save the replay and watch it from a multiple of different camera angles, but the top ten scores in the standard formation and landing modes are available to download online.

Brain training… for Sixaxis?

Sky Diving remains a cheap and cheerful title that will get your Sixaxis muscles flowing again. While the graphics are bright and physically detailed enough for a game of this style, the texture detail on the characters seems very blurred and simplistic, despite a relative amount of customisation available. Unfortunately, it does very little more than those classic mini-games from way back in Final Fantasy VII’s time (and no-where near as detailed as the ‘skydiving’ segments of the new Ratchet & Clank).

The game feels like it is trying to be more of a simulation than a gameplay experience, and unfortunately flops a few steps short of the gameplay we were hoping for. Sure you’ll play through everything once to see what’s there, but as trying to find an online game will show you, no-one really wants to play it much after that. Like many of these Xbox Live and PSN games their price tag allows a certain amount of leeway, especially since the game is mildly entertaining the first time you try it and more so if you can convince some friends to fight with the controls, but it doesn’t even come close to the Super Stardust HDs and even the flOws that we’re already privy to this generation. Personally, I’d save my money for Everyday Shooter that’s meant to be out anytime now.