The Nardio Review
Is Shooty Skies worth your time?
No
What should I play Shooty Skies on?
I’d only play this on a tablet.
What did we think without spoiling it?
Brace yourself… Bad gameplay and video ads are coming.
Shooty Skies is a clever ad marketing tool disguised as a mediocre shoot em up.
It’s just meh and deleted.
Avoid this.
How it plays & why it fails:
Cheap death-> watch an ad-> Cheap death-> Fail
Unlock a weapon-> Shut off the game in frustration ->Weapon gone->Watch ad or pay again to unlock
repeat->Delete
It seems like Shooty Skies was purposefully designed as a poor shoot em up to maximize ad watching revenue and yet it’s pretty popular on the iOS appstore. No surprise there as it’s brought to you by the same people who made Crossy Road. I didn’t like it at all.
Your plane is just too darn big to avoid enemy fire when things get tight. To make matters worse, homing projectiles are overused like crazy & in close proximity to regular fire. This leads to lots of cheap deaths and ads watched for continues. It gets tiring really darn fast. The bullets aren’t the only problem. Enemies that weren’t killed can sometimes fly behind you and somehow also home in on you for extra cheap deaths.
Oh, but it gets better worse. Progression in this game is never permanent or really rewarding. Shooty Skies has gun upgrades tied to coin purchases, but it’s more like a rental. Shooty Skies once again milks the video ad revenue out of players by referring to these purchases as “Temporary power ups” as opposed to permanent boosts most gamers are accustomed to.
So @KlickTock are guns I’ve already paid for supposed to locked behind a video paywall for me to use them? pic.twitter.com/x9FeTCIJNM
— Nardio.net (@Nardionet) October 4, 2015
@Nardionet they’re temporary power ups 🙂
— Matt Hall (@KlickTock) October 4, 2015
The only good thing I can say about the game is the ads aren’t intrusive. They are video ads that you need to initiate. Had Shooty Skies included pop up interstitial ads it would have been deleted off my iPad faster than you can say bad shoot em up. You get one continue when you are playing this mess. You can either watch a video to do so or pay an ever increasing amount of coins depending on how long you lasted. In most cases it seems you should just watch the video to save gold. Unfortunately, after playing this long enough (For the review I swear. I wouldn’t have given this more than 5 minutes normally) you realize that even the gold is worthless. After your first gun rental expires the same gun can be re-rented with another investment of gold or an ad. Guess which one seems easier to do. So here is a badly designed game that fails at gameplay but was expertly crafted to get people to watch ads.
I don’t like it. Had Shooty Skies had actual progression so you can last longer it would be better. If it had fairer enemies it would be better. Instead Shooty Skies plays like a game, by game devs trying to show you as many ads as possible without making it seem like it’s forced. Shooty Skies is expertly designed to make gullible players want ads for the illusion of progression.
Shooty Skies is a crappy game and a wonderful ad tool. I hope the dev gets an honorable mention in the next AdWeek.
Avoid this…
Like?
It deleted just fine.
Agree? Disagree? Write your comments below.
Basic Info:
- Free
- 71.4 MB
- Universal app
- In-App Purchases
