Skybolt Zack Review
There is a category of video games that are solely focused on being difficult. However, it’s not quite the same kind of difficult as Dark Souls or the games it inspired, instead this difficulty is about challenging platforming, navigating the character through perilous environments, often at a very fast pace. I usually stay away from these kinds of games because my reflexes aren’t very good, but this past week one of these types of games caught my eye. Skybolt Zack was able to overcome my natural aversion to these challenging, high-speed platforming games thanks to its colorful graphics and delightful premise.
In Skybolt Zack, players take control of Zack, a man with mechanical, rocket-powered fists. Earth has been taken over and broken into chunks by the robotic army of a mysterious villain, so Zack must use his rocket-fists to smash through the robotic invaders, defeat the enigmatic bad guy, and save the world. The way Zack does this is by rocket-punching the villain’s robots, which all happen to be the same colors as the buttons on game controllers, so as players press the buttons, Zack smashes the corresponding robots. Because the controls are simple, the levels get creative to challenge the player. As players proceed through a level, they must not only pay attention to which button to press next but also which direction to move after the punch, when to use lateral mid-air dashes, when to jump, and most importantly, when to not punch. All of these aspects work together to make a challenging platformer that also feels like a rhythm game at its best moments.
There are a lot of things I like about Skybolt Zack but my absolute favorite feature is how cool the game is and how cool it makes the player feel when playing. The first layer of this is the game’s look. Zack himself has cool hair, a cool scar, and a very cool jacket to compliment his awesome over-sized, rocket-powered robotic hands. The designs of the robot foes are fairly simple but all have strong thematic resemblance to older sci-fi robots, big and clunky with one huge, glowing eye. The second layer of Skybolt Zack’s coolness is the music. The game’s music actually changes as the player does better in a level. At the base performance level, players are treated to powerful and fast rock with synths, drums, and fantastic guitar. Then, at certain performance thresholds, the music will subtly transition to that level’s next track which is fundamentally the same but has a quicker tempo and more complex instrumentation. The change is unnoticeable during gameplay as players must focus on the next few moves, but this constant musical encouragement helps the game feel good and full of life at any level of performance.
The third aspect of Skybolt Zack that makes it so cool is that it works very hard to make sure everyone who plays it feels cool. Every level has multiple paths through it and each path is hand-designed to cater to a different skill level. The most challenging paths are all high off the ground where Zack’s rocket-fists can fly free but also feature the most difficult sections, meaning players have to be on their toes and quick to react, whereas the simplest paths tend to stick near the ground, so that players with less sharp reflexes can fall to the nearby ground to recover after a missed button press and start up again in no time. But Skybolt Zack isn’t satisfied sticking players in one lane and holding them there. Throughout the levels, there are multiple places where players can change difficulty paths, often without realizing it, because the ascent/descent points are designed to fit in with each path fluidly, so players are inevitably going to find the path that is ideal for them. Beyond that, levels have more than one end point. At the end of each difficulty path, there is a door unique to that path, which dictates what level the player will go to next. This is because Skybolt Zack not only has adaptability in each level, there are actually different game levels with different difficulty ratings that follow the player’s skill. This extends throughout the entire game, even to the game’s final boss, who has two different levels, one that is more challenging and one less so. I absolutely adore this because there are a lot of people who play video games that don’t have the best coordination and a lot of games don’t make space for them, but Skybolt Zack shows that it’s totally possible for a game to be both challenging and approachable.
Unfortunately, while Skybolt Zack is almost perfect, it does have a few flaws. The foremost of these in my mind is the grey enemies. Unlike the other enemies who all correspond in function and color with the player’s controller, grey enemies must be defeated by pressing the jump button at the correct time. In a game that’s all about the rush of coordinated presses and strategic moves, these grey enemies feel bad to encounter and out of place. I thought there was enough precision needed in the rest of the game without these incredibly picky enemies. To imitate a famous cartoon emperor, they threw off my groove, and that’s bad in a game where the biggest selling point is the groove players find themselves in. The only other problem I had with Skybolt Zack is that it feels like it abandons its pledge to make space for players of all skill levels in the final boss. I know that a game’s final boss is supposed to be difficult and that there are two different boss levels players can access depending on performance, but when the whole game has featured multiple paths through each level, the final boss having only one set path feels like the game is taking away a set of tools the player has been able to rely on throughout the game in addition to presenting a harder level.
In a weird way, Skybolt Zack reminds me of A Place for the Unwilling in that they are both indie games made by a handful of developers that elicit extreme joy from me. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a game do what Skybolt Zack does even half as good as Skybolt Zack does it. Between the way it makes players feel empowered regardless of skill level and the absolute rush it invokes, I cannot recommend this game enough. I hope when you’re done reading this, you go out and buy this game because it’s worth so much more than the $20 they’re asking for it.
Buy this game at full price
It’s worth every penny they’re asking
