Sky Crawlers (Wii) - Review by Chris

Introduction

Although not a thriving genre, the Wii has seen its fare share of air combat titles, each of which has garnered its own levels of success or disappointment. Yet, while there have been releases in the genre on the console, almost all have lacked the visceral nature or the quality seen in some of the bigger games on the other consoles. Stepped up to the plate, however, are the team from Namco Bandai, responsible for the fantastic Ace Combat games, hoping to use their legacy to create a unique and gripping air combat title on the Wii. Does this one have what it takes to soar above the clouds or has it had its wings clipped?

Gameplay

The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces is based around the anime and novel of the same name so players who've had experiences with those will know some of the basics of what the story is about here. For those that haven't, the game is set within a world where all of the wars are designed and carried out by large corporations trying to one up each other. This game focuses on the events of two such corporations trying to do just that, as you take control of a pilot nicknamed Lynx and complete a succession of missions. But the game throws in some more convoluted content to the story, with one corporation employing children, given the cringe inducing nickname 'killdren', to act as their pilots and from this point the story seems very farfetched but it remains interesting throughout.

The crux of the gameplay falls to aerial combat as you take on the story mode's 18 chapters. Each of these has varying criteria that have to be met to be completed, such as taking down specific air, ground or sea targets, taking reconnaissance photos or protecting allied craft from attack. There isn't a huge amount of variation between the missions types, with the main set reused over and over across the 18 chapters, and most of the chapters themselves contain only a single objective, meaning that they are relatively short in length. Of course, there are other chapters that introduce progressive objectives but they never stray too far off of the beaten path.

Completion of each chapter and its objectives will yield a points total and rank which go towards the unlocking of new aircraft, of which there are 18 in total to get hold of, as well as upgradeable items to improve your current craft offerings. These upgrades take the form of new weapons, engines or paint jobs but ultimately, regardless of the plane you opt to use in a mission and regardless of the changes you make to them, the majority of the planes handle almost identically. This will be something newcomers to the genre will be thankful for as it means they'll be able to get to grips with all of the craft from the start but veterans will find the shallow depth in the planes outside of their design to be a big disappointment, especially considering the pedigree of the development team.

The biggest inclusion to the gameplay, which sets to differentiate the game for its brethren titles, is the Tactical Manoeuvre Command. This is where if you stay within close proximity of a target for a specified amount of time, a bar only the bottom of the screen will begin to fill up, with 3 sections capable of being filled the longer you tail your target. As each of these sections fills, you'll be able to pull off a tactical manoeuvre, done either automatically by pressing the A button or manually, to move in right behind your target and shoot them down. It's a great system and while it does make the game's early stages very easy, in later stages it becomes a necessity to clear your objectives.

The single player campaign, with its 18 chapters, isn't exactly of any startling length, and can easily be finished in a matter of single hours. But once you're finished there, there is little else to do. There are no multiplayer options and the only other mode is a Free Play mode where you can replay the missions from the campaign. An achievement-style medal system is implemented which does extend the length slightly but ultimately, the lack of content means that the experience is somewhat short lived in comparison to other games in the genre on the Wii.

Controls

The default control setup used for the game is certainly unique. While other games on the console have made use of the IR pointer and the Wii-mote for flying and shooting, here the game is controlled mainly through use of the Nunchuk. Using it like a flight stick, the Nunchuk controls your pitch and steering through tilts of the controller while turning the Wii-mote vertically and bringing it down to horizontal controls your speed. It definitely takes some getting used to and thankfully the game eases you into its workings in the early stages of the campaign while offering an expansive tutorial mode for you to get to grips with all of the controls.

After the initial break-in period, the controls feel intuitive and work well, but pulling of specific turns or getting a dead-on aim at targets can be a little more difficult due to the more basic accelerometer in the Nunchuk, so thankfully the Tactical Manoeuvre Command system is in place. If you feel that the gesture based controls aren't to your liking then you do have the option to make use of the Classic and Gamecube controllers and these work just as well although the experience does feel lessened without the use of the motion controls.

Graphics

Offering up a total of 26 craft for you to unlock and pilot, the game manages to provide a wide variety of designs that go far and beyond the typical aircraft designs you'll see in other games. Their design is great, taking cues from the anime itself and in game, they really look the part. Although there are some slightly muddy textures used for the planes, they still manage to look authentic and definitely feel unique in design when compared to other titles.

Peppered throughout the story mode are instances of cutscenes presented in the same style as the anime. While it does feel a little strange to have the anime influence and cutscenes at first, the high quality of the cutscenes soon dispel any misdemeanours and at times, you'll hurry through the gameplay just to see the next one because of how good they look, with vibrant colours and fantastic design work.

Unfortunately, while most of the constituents of the visuals are at least up to scratch, the environments unfortunately are not. Like every other air combat title on the console, the environments are large in scale giving you a large amount of freedom to fly about in but to compensate for the sheer scale of the locations, environmental detail is kept to a minimum with low resolution and flat textures for constructing towns and other parts of the scenery and while it gives the illusion of detail from far away, it looks a mess when you get up close. The small uses of 3D for scenery come in the form of buildings and the like but again, the use of low resolution textures and some poor polygon counts mean they never really look as good as either the planes or the cutscenes.

Sound

The soundtrack for the game is drastically different from what you would expect to hear in this style of game. Again, taking cues from the anime, the soundtrack is a mixture of Celtic and pipe music creating some strange but pleasant tracks to play to and while most of it does nothing more than create a level of ambience and stays lingering in the background, the main theme is particularly memorable and you will find it working its way into your head. Sound effects for the planes follow the tried and tested path, sounding very similar across all planes and sounding realistic.

All cutscenes are fully voiced, providing a level of quality which seems genuine although at times being rather cringeworthy. It certainly makes the cutscenes much more memorable as a result. It's just a shame that the voice work doesn't maintain the high quality in game, where the sound quality dips and sounds rather grainy, akin to something you would expect to hear coming out of the Wii-mote speaker although it's coming from the TV.

Final comments

The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces doesn't quite manage to hit the highs seen in the Ace Combat series, but Namco Bandai have created an interesting title that rubs shoulders nicely with brethren games in the genre. A unique control system and a story heavy campaign, complete with anime cutscenes, make it stand out but a lack of polish to the presentation as well as a lack of content all around means that the game hardly makes much of a stand against the genre greats. It's an enjoyable game for its runtime but you'll be back in the hangar with little else to do before long.

Pro: Interesting, if sometimes silly, story, anime cutscenes are great, controls are surprisingly good but take some getting used to
Con: No multiplayer and little in the way of alternate play modes, environmental visuals are of a low quality
Final score: 7.4

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