Alien Sky Review

Remember those arcade shoot-'em-up classics Galaga and Galaxian? Alien Sky pays homage to those games, featuring the same simple design that places you in a modestly armed space ship that must defeat hundreds of swarming alien foes. All you can do besides shoot is move side to side, dodging the aliens' suicidal dashes as well as their streams of deadly bullets. What distinguishes Alien Sky from its 20-year-old predecessors is that you'll face a variety of increasingly powerful enemies, and you'll need to take advantage of numerous power-up items that occasionally appear. Every 12 stages, you'll also take on a powerful boss opponent of some sort. Alien Sky's pretty, smoothly animated 3D graphics and true-to-its-roots gameplay make it work well as a gussied-up nostalgia piece, and the gameplay is fun for a while. However, the rather large size of your ship and the somewhat slippery mouse-driven controls make it difficult to resist the onslaught after the first few levels, each one consisting of a dozen stages. Some difficulty options would have been welcome here. As it stands, Alien Sky is a nicely produced tribute to a style of gameplay that's still quite fun in spite of its age.