Even better, if you fail at the last hurdle and die during the end of level boss it will still register the challenge, which is a really forgiving touch. You don’t have to complete the challenges all in one go, so you can play the stage and focus on killing enemies and then play it again to capture the humans, each completed challenge adding a score multiplier for when you finish the stage. It works brilliantly, as falling back to the lower stages with a powerful ship means you make mincemeat of the enemies and challenges that seemed difficult can be completed with ease. By then your ship should be powerful enough to complete the stage that was previously too hard. This means that when one of the higher numbered stages becomes too challenging you can fall back to an earlier level on a harder difficulty level, grind that and complete the challenges. Complete the challenges for the hard stage and you unlock the insane version of the stage which awards triple stars. Completing the four challenges for each stage, which include destroying 100% of all enemies and collecting all the humans that are dotted around the landscape, will unlock a hard version of the stage with more bullets flying around the screen and double the amount of stars as your reward.
Every time you play a stage you will progress just a little, achieving more goals, and collecting just enough stars to power up your ship just a little more, allowing you to progress a little bit further. This is where the grind comes in, but it’s superbly balanced. It’s all the usual stuff, and each addition to your ship can be powered up many times. The stars can be used to boost your main weapon, add side cannons, homing missiles, shields, lasers, smart bombs, and so on. In the iOS game you could buy packs of stars to speed things up, but thankfully there are no microtransactions in the game and you wouldn’t need them anyway. You can then pop back to your hangar and spend the stars to improve your ship. However, it’s just strong enough to get you part way through the level, during which destroyed enemies will release stars for you to collect. Your ship is utterly pathetic to begin with and, to paraphrase the 1994 dance classic “Short D*ck Man” by 20 Fingers, “That has got to be the smallest laser I have ever seen in my whole life!” It’s barely a pixel wide and does about as much damage as being attacked with ping-pong balls.
The game is a vertical scrolling shoot ’em up with enemies attacking you from land, air, and sea as you relentlessly scroll upwards to the end of level boss battle. Not looking good is it? And what if I tell you this is a shoot ’em up that makes you grind, repeating the same levels over and over? It really, really should be utterly awful, but it’s not, it’s bloody fantastic. It’s a shoot ’em up, a genre that has been generally stale for decades, it’s made by iDreams, the team behind Let’s Create Pottery on iOS, it’s a sequel to a game that’s over ten years old, and yes, it’s a conversion of a mobile game which had in-app purchase. On paper everything about Sky Force Reloaded would suggest it’s not going to be great.
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