Review by: Tom Chick

I know that MySims Sky Heroes is a family game, but that doesn’t give it a free pass to suck. Especially since the MySims series has mostly done a good job of appealing to non-kids. These have been the next best things to the Lego series when it comes to kids’ games that we non-kids can enjoy without being accompanied by a child. And, of course, they’re great for kids. And for kids to enjoy alongside non-kids. But Sky Heroes manages to blow it on all three fronts. Whether you’re a kid, a non-kid, or a kid/non-kid combo, this is one flight you’ll want to miss.

The basic idea of Sky Heroes’ combat is sound. You have to shoot down enemies to earn health. When you damage an enemy plane, you shave off floating health powerups that will heal you slightly. When you kill the enemy plane, it drops a whole mess of them. So the way to avoid getting killed is to get kills. Instead of arming your plane with weapons before you take off, the levels are festooned with power-ups, encouraging players to dash for one – and only one, since that's all you can carry – and to then use it immediately, at which point they either have to dash for another or just resort to their regular guns and slowly replenishing missiles. It’s half airplane combat, half scrounging.

The levels are colorful and sometimes even clever, with lots of hidden nooks and cute environmental hazards like grasping tentacles reaching out of the sea. Between missions, you gad about a little globe, visiting factions like a naval fleet, some Power Puff style grrl pilots, cute ninjas, and so forth, suffering through insufferable inescapable Simlish dialogue. They went to the trouble of recording it, so you’re going to listen to it, by gum.

Don’t be fooled into thinking there’s any variety, though. You’re only ever deathmatching, with the occasional race, which is really a deathmatch where everyone flies along a set course while shooting at each other. Along the way, you unlock a whole mess of airplane parts that have no effect whatsoever and the occasional perk to makes your plane better.

The actual gameplay is flat-out terrible for how little it understands about how to make an action game with airplanes. I hesitate to drag in a hardcore flight sim term like “situational awareness”, but it simply can’t be helped. If you’re going to make an action game where everyone’s zipping around in the sky in tiny nimble airplanes, you need to make sure we have some way to keep track of each other. We need to know what we’re shooting at and where to shoot. It's called “situational awareness” or, more colloquially, “knowing what the heck is going on”.

That’s a luxury Sky Heroes can’t be bothered to afford you. Instead, you get to shoot at distant dots with bloated health bar displays floating alongside. There’s no way of telling anything about where a dot is going to fly, so you get to engage in some guesswork until it’s departed your screen, at which point it’s clear which way the dot flew and now you get to turn and hope you see it again. Mostly likely it will a) be completely gone, or b) suddenly zip across the screen going the other way. Maybe you can watch the radar display in the corner for a top-down view of the vicinity, in which case you’re not lining up shots, but at least you can get a sort of academic assessment of who’s pointed which way.