On a world similar to ours, flying whales called Leviathans from outer space have come to slumber.  They bring with them magical powers, and the greedy people of the planet have sent out robots to capture the Leviathans.  But a group of rebels who have learned to live in harmony with the Leviathans is going to help them escape.  Ride a Leviathan in the sky and defend it from robots in this fast-paced action game on Switch and PC, but reviewed on Switch here.

In the main game, you are riding the whale in the sky and can jump and dash in any direction with the same button.  When the robots come, you’ll want to jump and dash onto one, and when you jump off, you’ll destroy it.  You can aim where you go, so if there are other robots nearby, you can jump onto them for chain reactions.  You can also use a grappling hook to latch onto far away robots.  The robots are constantly firing at the whale, whittling down its health.  When it reaches zero, the whale must go back down to base and your session ends.

Back at base, you can use the money you’ve earned on your last run to buy upgrades.  These include more life for the whale, more money collected, and faster flight for the whale, too.  You can also upgrade a tree that’ll give you more features when it levels up, like extra challenges and whatnot.  When you are ready, you can hop back on the whale and try for another run.  The game is all right, but it’s awfully grindy for such a repetitive game.  And the tiny graphics, sprites, and text made everything hard to see, especially in handheld mode.  Because of all that, I lost interest in this one pretty quickly.

Kid Factor:

Skies Above is rated E-10 with an ESRB descriptor of Fantasy Violence.  You just destroy robots that explode when defeated.  And when your whale runs out of life, it just has exploding animations around it as it goes back down under the clouds.  But back at base it seems ok.  Reading skill is helpful for the text, and younger gamers may find it too difficult.

Tags: Game Reviews