Review: Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces

I came to Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces with an untainted perspective. Basically, this is the first game even resembling a flight simulator that I’ve ever touched. The genre has always been fairly intimidating, known for its unbelievably steep learning curve and a community, if not unfriendly to outsiders, not exactly reaching out. The images of aircraft-worthy control decks and ultra realistic graphics only helped to keep me away. Project Aces has attempted to bridge this gap over the years with a series of console-friendly flight games, and for the most part they’ve been well received. Sky Crawlers tries to bridge the gap even further by combining a flight engine with an already established book and anime movie. For many, particularly those who found the Sky Crawlers movie enjoyable, this gap was not difficult to traverse. It’s a smart move, and for the most part it works because it not only adds a pleasing aesthetic to the game, but gets an enjoyable, while not uber-realistic, flight sim into the hands of those it might not otherwise have found.

The story of Sky Crawlers is perhaps its biggest flaw. It’s not necessarily a bad story. With a little research and investigation it’s actually fascinating and deep. It involves an alternate history at a time when the great powers of the world decide to forgo wars and instead have corporations sponsor their own pilots for mock competitions. ”Mock” competitions doesn’t really fit, however, because the pilots are in very real danger and death is a common occurrence. Nevertheless, it serves to sate people’s appetite for televised war.

Unfortunately, the story in the game does very little to explain what’s happening. The manual offers some backstory, but it seems expected these days that in game cut scenes will do a better job. Sky Crawlers does have some beautiful anime scenes, but they’re often confusing and aren’t a clear storyteller. The player’s character, a pilot named Lynx, is also hard to sympathize with despite the fact that we’re always in his shoes. He never says a word to anyone, and while we might be familiar with this from RPGs over the years, we also never even see him outside of a cut scene. The gameplay is such that only his plane is ever seen, and thus it’s difficult to really find oneself in his shoes. Add to this the fact that halfway through the game he gets an unexpected name change (or we’re thrust into someone else’s shoes, I was never honestly clear on this point), and it gets even more confusing.

I know this all sounds trivial to a game that offers flight simulated combat. It’s not about the story, right? Well, I disagree. This game is taken from a very narrative source. The Sky Crawlers name originally comes from a book series by renowned Japanese mystery novelist Hiroshi Mori. It was adapted into a full length anime movie not long ago, which also received much praise. Having watched that movie myself before playing the game, I can attest to its quality. It boasts some of the best visuals of any anime movie I’ve ever seen, and while the story is subtle and requires a close eye for detail, it’s also very deep and heartfelt. With all this in mind, I approached the game seeking something similar, and found it lacking in its storytelling elements. Where other flight simulations might draw someone in purely with controls and realism, this game needed that story element to not only set it apart, but attract a larger player base. I feel like it failed in this endeavor for the most part.

The controls for Sky Crawlers are new to the Wii. It uses the nunchuck and Wiimote in an odd way. The nunchuck serves as a steering mechanism, controlling directional movement up and down and tilt left and right. The Wiimote is used for accelerating and decelerating, shifting it horizontal or vertical for the desired effect. The nunchuck buttons are used for weapon selection and deployment, and the Wiimote’s buttons are usually just menu-based, though in combat the giant A button is also used for maneuvering. I’m not entirely sure why Project Aces decided on the nunchuck for the directional control considering the amount of precision needed for that versus the lack of precision needed for speeding up or slowing down. It works, but it’s not always perfect, and I often found myself full-body heaving to one side or the other just to get my plane working correctly. For the most part, the nunchuk is fine, and for 90% of my playtime the controls all worked wonderfully. Nevertheless, given the more precise nature of the Wiimote for these types of motion controls, one wonders if it might have worked 100% of the time. The addition of the Wii Motion Plus could have added even more precision.

Gameplay has a very Valkyrie Chronicles style to it, which is certainly to its favor. Players jump from mission to mission via menus, but are able to visit the hangar between each to check out new planes and new add-ons and even paintj obs. Planes are fairly customizable and are available in multiple flavors. The different nuances of each plane never really struck me, and thus picking one over another was generally a matter of speed and weapon availability (not all planes can equip the same weapon set). The hangar navigation also gets frustrating. In order to see what weapons any given plane has available, one has to go completely into that particular plane’s customization options. For the simple matter of gaining information, this takes far too long. An option for some type of table that listed weapons and which planes could equip them would have made plane customization considerably easier.

Missions have a fairly widespread variety to them, and while objectives may differ, the goal is usually to destroy things. What things players destroy can vary a bit as there are both land and air targets, but destruction is the name of the game. I enjoyed most of the missions, and a few of them even require some crack strategy and loadout customization, but there were a few that also nearly marred the entire game. There is also an inconsistency in the checkpoint system they implemented, mainly that its completely non-existent in some missions. Fighting for 20 minutes only to die to a stupid mistake on a mission that has clear stages is extremely frustrating. When the mission has clear spots where checkpoints could have been implemented and weren’t, I have to question if logic was used.

Visually the game is nothing special, and expect to hook it up to a standard definition television to make it look its best (as with most Wii games). It does boast some pretty scenery, and the cut scenes are well done in the anime style, but honestly are we really expecting much out of the Wii in terms of graphical prowess these days? Only when developers take a unique approach like with Muramasa are we really going to get anything gorgeous on Nintendo’s outdated hardware.

And then there’s what I suppose we can call the “BAMF” factor. Personally, I found an enormous amount of satisfaction in gunning down enemy planes. Maybe it was the freshness of the genre that most hooked me, having never played anything with real dog fighting in it. Lynx/Cheetah definitely has advantages versus other pilots with the variety of maneuvers he can pull off, and often this makes fights very uneven in his favor. But even if my own skill at flight is an illusion, it’s a good one because every time I would flip around and place myself behind someone for an easy kill, it felt good. And the controls work in an almost child-like way, nearly mimicking those movements we might use when “air-gunning” down a Nazi plane while pretending to be a World War 2 hero in our rooms with our pillow-made aircraft and our grandma’s oversized glasses mimicking flight goggles perched atop our head…ahem. So the BAMF factor is definitely there, and my whoops and taunts at the screen were definite evidence of this.

I really wanted to like Sky Crawlers, and honestly I did like it. But at the same time, I couldn’t help but feel that if a few things were done different, if maybe they’d taken more time to flesh out the story or at least explain a little, that it would have been a fantastic voyage in flight simulation. The game’s short, which I have no problems with as it has replayability both in fun factor and for the multitude of unlockable planes, plane parts, and medals, and it’s certainly a good time. Add to this its BAMF factor and there’s no reason anyone with an interest in dog fighting and a Wii shouldn’t buy this at a mere 30 dollars. I also do hold out some hope that it will sell well enough to warrant a sequel, one that might fix the mistakes of this “pilot” effort and give us a truly memorable and complete experience. Were some issues addressed, controls tweaked a bit, and a proper localization team brought into the project, we could easily have a Valkyria Chronicles of the sky on our hands. The more games of that caliber floating around, the happier we’ll all be.