Sky Mercenaries Redux

Genre: Shmup

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Sky Mercenaries is a Shmup originally released on PC in 2014 and then ported to Nintendo Switch in 2020 with the addition of “Redux” to the title along with new features like a stage builder mode.

The presentation here is a bit of a mixed bag, with decent 2D visuals but terrible character artwork and forgettable synthesized music. This is joined by unnecessarily confusing menu design. While nothing here is outright damning, it all has the look of something that seems to be trying to imitate what Shmups tend to look like rather than having a strong unified vision of its own.

Sadly, this latter comment extends to the gameplay as well. It feels like this game tossed just about everything at the wall to see what sticks. Multiple characters, each with their own ship, their own experience-based skill tree, their own inventory of upgrades purchased through currency gathered through gameplay, and their own entourage of upgradeable drones with their own currency-based upgrades. The game naturally does a poor job of explaining how all of this works, leaving the player to find out for themselves.

When it comes to the actual Shmup gameplay, this game copies Ikaruga‘s color-swapping system, but lacks that game’s elegancy of design, instead making players hot-swap their way through handfuls of enemies that often seem to shoot whichever color projectile suits them.

Beyond all of this, there’s the simple problem that your ship’s size is far too big to be properly maneuverable, and this problem is exacerbated further by your helped drones also being able to take damage. It’s such a pervasive problem that this game seems to operate under the assumption that avoiding taking damage is impossible, so you’ll instead be trying to minimize it.

Again, none of this makes Sky Mercenaries outright bad, it just makes it a huge mess. My entire time playing this game, I simply did not feel like there was a strong purpose or direction for this game, so much as numerous purposes all tossed together in hopes that maybe between them a functional game would emerge. But if you want a well-crafted Shmup with color-swapping gameplay, Ikaruga is much better, and sells at the exact same price. If you want a Shmup with an RPG-style upgrade system, you also have better options, like Sky Force Reloaded, which is $5 cheaper than this game. And beyond this, you have countless other better Shmups on the Nintendo Switch. As such, it’s hard to recommend this one.

tl;dr – Sky Mercenaries is a Shmup what seems to try to throw a lot of stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and the result is a jumbled mess of a Shmup that isn’t outright bad, but lacks a coherent vision as well as a firm grasp of some of the genre’s fundamentals. It’s not without its fun moments, but there are far too many great Shmups on Nintendo Switch to waste time and money on this mediocre one.

Grade: C

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