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.

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.

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.

You'll be fully briefed before each mission, though the build we're currently playing has only the first mission's briefing in. The premission interface allows you to do quite a bit of research as to what you'll be up against, though, as well as configure a bunch of parameters pertinent to your success. It is here that you change your armaments and set the behaviors that you'll want your wingmen to follow. Your wingmen will be present in most missions, and, depending on how you set their AI, they'll concentrate their efforts on certain types of enemies. For instance, you can set it so that they'll go after ground or air targets exclusively or support you heavily. If you choose the latter, they'll stick more closely to you and engage enemies that encroach on your space. You can also select what sort of aircraft they'll pilot and how they will be armed.

You'll control your planes in a manner similar to most console flight games' "expert modes." Specifically, you control pitch and roll with the left stick and apply and decrease thrust with the R1 and L1 buttons, respectively. You can also alter your yaw with the R2 and L2 keys and shift your camera view with the select key. Various views are available, including several outside views, a cockpit view, and a genuine first-person view. You shoot your machine gun with the X button and fire whatever missiles you have at ready with the circle button. The square button, finally, toggles targets for your radar-guided weapons, and the triangle button scrolls through your available weapons. Overall, the control scheme works quite well, and you can even adjust the levels of controller sensitivity in the game's options menu. As of yet, though, we've yet to see any evidence of a novice control scheme.

Lethal Skies is also a fairly nice-looking PS2 game. Much of the game takes place over water, as you'd imagine, and Asmik has added some nice specular highlights to its surface to simulate its interaction with the light. The planes themselves seem nicely modeled, and everything moves at a smooth, brisk rate--60fps seems to be the order of the day, in fact. Some of the more off-the-wall vehicle designs, further, are pretty cool looking, and the size of some of the larger ones really hits home when you're flying among them, more often than not trying to blow them up. The ground textures do leave a bit to be desired, but it's nothing worse than what we're used to seeing on the PS2. Since you'll be going so fast, most of the time, you'll seldom notice.

Lethal Skies is due out in May, and it is definitely something that fans of flight combat will want to keep their eyes on. It definitely plays right, and its concept is backed up quite well by some cool mission designs and some off-the-wall vehicles. We'll have more for you as soon as we get our hands on a fully localized version.