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Ace Academy: Skies of Fury | Android

818 View2024-07-30

We will experience the bloody April of 1917

📖 Storyline: We will fly over the skies during the Battle of Arras in the war period of the First World War between the British and the Germans. So in the surroundings of Arras, in France, a significant battle took place during the First World War, from April 9 to May 16, 1917. This offensive, conducted by the British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and Newfoundland forces, had the objective of breaking the trench stalemate that characterized the Western Front. The strategy involved a coordinated attack with the French army, aiming for a rapid conclusion of the conflict. The territorial conquest proved to be rather limited with the ground armies but had a turning point for the innovative use of tactics such as barrage fire and air support.

🎮 Gameplay: Despite the historical influence, the action is very arcade-focused, in fact, we will be able to dodge enemy attacks by simply tapping an icon on the screen. And to become the best ace of the skies we will be able to choose whether to side with the British pilots and/or the German pilots who are both fighting for their lives. Once you have chosen which side to be on, there will be three ways to pilot the aircraft: Gyroscope (tilting the device), touchscreen icons or with a joypad/controller. Here the planes are the faithful representation of the aircraft of the First World War and even include epic fights with splendid cartoon settings, between a victory and/or failure, made entirely by hand respecting the canons of the time. There are no less than one hundred missions and ten planes available with distinct statistics, obviously each is completely customizable with over ninety hand-painted skins!

🕹️ Controls: There are optional challenges similar to the skulls in the Halo series that can be applied before the mission to help add some difficulty to the proceedings without being overwhelming. Additionally, acceleration and yaw are assigned to the left d-pad while the right handles pitch/roll (represented by an up and down arrow). The controls take a little getting used to, especially as the relatively small d-pad doesn't lend itself well to the tight turns that are often a feature of dogfights and especially when flying through hoops for timed challenges; this can be avoided by simply docking any controller, and in my case I used the backbone, which helps alleviate this issue. What is disappointing is the overall lack of customization options.

🎨 Graphics: It has bold textures that help give the title a lot of character especially as we fight and fly through giant marshmallow clouds so thick you can seemingly jump out of them and walk on them! The visual aesthetics are inspired by the comics of the time using the cell-shading graphics engine, and between missions, we will also have the opportunity to enjoy a very pleasant reading of the panels all drawn entirely by hand to understand what really happened during the bloody Battle of Arras.

🇮🇹 Personal considerations: The title is divided into five chapters, with missions divided between the German and British forces. Completing all the missions in a chapter will reward us with a new series of comics that convey the narrative of the game. As we progress, we are also given skill points to choose new skills to mitigate/increase incoming/outgoing damage with faster health regeneration, larger magazines and a more lethal special attack. Another interesting feature is the ability to grab our AI allies as minions, adding to their firepower in line with ours for greater damage and simultaneously acting as shields against incoming attacks. Also included is multiplayer and a survival mode that can be played in co-op. I would like to point out that for left-handed people, it will be difficult to use the right d-pad for maneuvers, also because there is no alternative control scheme available. The only customization options are to invert with the Y-axis, so I imagine you will often be forced to make do just to activate the rumble. It seems that a patch is coming with fifty new missions added with a time Attack mission and three new skins for the planes including Russia, America and Brazil. The AI of the enemy pilots has been made even more realistic but balanced.

By AlessiaBNERD