Game Reviews

Sky Hero

Star onStar onStar onStar offStar off
|
iOS
| Sky Hero
Get
Sky Hero
|
iOS
| Sky Hero

In Sky Hero, you take control of an everyman soldier named John who gets landed with the responsibility of delivering a letter from the tower he's currently stationed on to an addressee on the ground.

John's commander decides that the fastest way to accomplish this is to have John jump from the tower and let gravity do the rest.

And you thought your job was miserable.

Geronimo!

On the way down you have to navigate through a brigade of airborne enemies and critters looking to intercept you. These critters will fly up from the bottom of the screen or swoop down from the top, giving Sky Hero a good amount of challenge.

To navigate around these enemies, you can either use the optional tilt controls or tap on the left and right sides of the screen to move John about. Your vertical position and speed of descent are fixed, however, which adds to the game's challenge.

While John never sets foot on the ground, his trip down is certainly not a boring one. Groups of coins hover in mid-air for you to collect, and various power-ups litter the skies around the game's towers.

There are various missions to play through along the way, but these rarely consist of doing anything other than what you'd do in the course of a normal play-through. Many of them focus on collecting a certain amount of coins or falling for a certain amount of time.

Free fall

This all combines to create a fairly well-executed, if incredibly familiar, gameplay experience.

This isn't to say that Sky Hero is fundamentally flawed in any way - just that it doesn't do anything particularly new.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the game's shop. If you’re familiar with endless-running games, you can probably already guess at the purchasable power-ups in Sky Hero's store. Familiar entrants like Head Start (which starts you at 600m instead of 0m), Revive Hearts and the like are all available to buy with coins.

These coins are collected slowly in the span of a normal play-through, but you can obtain them in larger quantities via in-app purchases to speed up progress and change John's uniform into a whimsical animal costume.

Uncontrolled descent

Sky Hero's greatest failing is that it lacks any particular incentive to invest time or money in it.

Unlike, for example, endless-running stablemate Flight!, which establishes a simple yet heartwarming, backstory its first 20 seconds, Sky Hero anticipates that you'll want to play the game simply for the sake of playing the game.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this approach, and in fact it's refreshingly honest in a weird sort way, but if you're looking for a deep game experience or one that makes you care about the character and what he's doing, Sky Hero certainly isn't the game for you.

If you're looking for a fun, polished, and addictive game to play when you have an idle minute to kill during the day, Sky Hero will deliver everything that you're looking for and more.

Sky Hero

An entertaining dodgem-style falling game, great for passing play sessions and little else
Score
Matthew Diener
Matthew Diener
Representing the former colonies, Matt keeps the Pocket Gamer news feed updated when sleepy Europeans are sleeping. As a frustrated journalist, diehard gamer and recovering MMO addict, this is pretty much his dream job.