Lethal Skies Preview

Sammy is releasing Lethal Skies in North America, a game that was released last December in Japan under the name Sidewinder F. It's an Ace Combat-style air combat game, and it puts a pretty defined emphasis on fast and loose combat. And though most of the planes you'll fly are modeled after real-world aircraft, two of them are completely imaginary. The game is totally more akin to G.I. Joe than Top Gun, and the high-strung action and handful of imaginary craft are only partially responsible. It's the game's narrative--and the way it dictates that the game's environments be designed--that feels most like something from the pages of a military fantasy comic. The world in Lethal Skies has been suffering from global warming in a bad way--the frozen reaches of Siberia have all but melted away, submerging many of the world's civilized centers. The tips of New York City's skyscrapers now jut out from under the ocean's surface, and Washington DC's inhabitants have literally moved underground. In this grim world, a group called the World Order Reorganization Front (WORF, for short) has risen to power, and it has been launching strategic strikes on some of the world's remaining civilized centers from its evil floating headquarters. As a pilot for the UN-esque International Alliance's elite Team SW, you're charged with stopping WORF in its tracks by blowing up any of its vehicles and structures that you encounter.

Preparing for takeoff.

What it all amounts to is action like you'd find in a more subdued flight combat game, set on stages a bit more fantastical than what you're perhaps used to. You'll fight in stages composed of submerged skyscrapers, underground magma-filled tunnels that feature huge fortified enemy complexes, and other, often more fanciful, environments. Though most of what you fight will be a bit more grounded in reality, there's the occasional behemoth helicopter or shadow-tech stealth bomber to keep things flighty. The actual planes you'll fly include versions of F-14s, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, Su-27s, F-22s, and others, and you'll fight a whole bunch of things: evil WORF MiGs, tanks, SAM-strapped battleships, Tiger choppers, and more. There are 13 flyable aircraft in all, four of which are available to you at the game's outset--the rest will be unlocked as you complete missions. You'll be able to load whatever plane you're flying with a variety of munitions, including air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons of both the radar- and laser-guided varieties, and sometimes even of the faith-guided kind. To name names, you'll see mavericks, newts, harms, tarantulas, and more.

Heading out on a new mission.

There are 20 missions in all, and their locales range from the middle of the Pacific Ocean to the scrub flats of southern Peru. As mentioned before, though, the actual mission areas are often inspired in the way they're laid out. One level set in Antarctica, for instance, will send you through a series of tunneling canyons, which, when viewed from high overhead, can seem quite mazelike. Your target will be opposite from where you start--an enemy structure guarded by a battleship sitting midstream and a bunch of SAM batteries surrounding it. Littering the "passage" will be smaller battleships and Tiger choppers, which you'll be tempted to simply avoid by flying high over them. Do so, though, and the squadron of MiGs patrolling the area will catch sight of you and make easy work of you. So you have to tunnel your way through and make short, slow passes over the target structure once you reach it. Needless to say, it's as challenging as it is intense.