I’ve always wanted to go skydiving. Aerial_Knight’s DropShotby indie developer Aerial_Knight, allows me to live that dream – at least in a safe, virtual way. It also allows me to shoot bullets from finger guns, control laser skulls, and wear cool sunglasses while falling through the air. So maybe it’s better than the real thing.
Playing as a character named Smoke Wallace, who was bitten by a dragon that gave him a finger gun that can actually shoot bullets, you fall to the ground and try to fend off the bad guys with this finger gun or melee shots. It’s a first-person game, and the perspective really helps sell the feeling of falling through the sky.
Your goal is to survive each level without taking more than two hits from bad guys or other hazards like lasers, all while destroying as many enemies as possible as quickly as possible. Your gun has a limited number of bullets, but you can refill the ammo by shooting or flying into the balloons you see as you fall.
Each level is short. I finished most of them in 45 seconds to a minute and a half. At the end, you get a letter grade based on how many enemies you take down, and if you reach a certain level goal, you can max out at S+++. Since terrain, obstacles, enemies, and speed boosts appear in the same place in each level, repeating them in an attempt to get a high score turns each level into a fast-paced FPS puzzle that you can crack to find the optimal path.
The game oozes style. Smoke Wallace has purple skin due to his dragon bite. He wears sunglasses, and you can choose different styles that give you different egg-hunting power-ups, such as one that briefly allows you to fire six finger guns at once. Every time you kill a bad guy, the game slows down briefly. You’ll even take on bosses that include dragons and flying tanks. And the whole time you’re treated to an amazing heavy metal soundtrack.
I’m done with DropShot after about two and a half hours and I could spend more time grinding for an S+++ score if I wanted to. But I think the short length works in the game’s favor: DropShot it explores its core mechanics in 50 great levels instead of stretching everything into something that might wear out. Even though I was nearing the end, I was still excited every time I flew through the sky.