Sky Racket

A combination of horizontal shmup and brick breaking/breakout game by a Brazilian team that works surprisingly well as a concept, to the point I'm disappointed there are no other games like this! Our characters technically can't shoot, but instead use their rackets to send most bullets back to the enemies and destroy the floating bricks that appear everywhere. It has a simple but effective scoring system that gives us a multiplier if we manage to keep rebounding the balls as many times as possible without losing them and picking up as many bonuses left by enemies and bricks in the meantime. Brick breaking games usually become repetitive after a while, but here the variety is guaranteed by a number of missions/achievements we can get in each stage, and the fact that the gameplay changes in some later areas, for example becoming a game of pinball with bumpers and all! There are also a few satellite character/"options" that give us various effects from a shield to a laser beam, after finding them we can recruit them as many times as we want in order to clear stages and complete missions more efficiently. And they will be needed for the boss battles that become quite challenging and akin to bullet hell games, especially the final fight! (The penultimate one is similar to a game of PONG instead, albeit a quite difficult one) The pixel art is lovely with a variety of cute enemies, colorful background with multiple parallax levels and many nods to Japanese animation and comics, not only the cool hand-drawn intro animation but stuff like giant robots and kaiju-style monsters, color-coded squads, mascot-style critters and so on. The soundtrack is similarly very catchy and happy, with some funny sound effects that are helpful in some of the most hectic moments. If I had to find problems, there's the fact that it is quite short (akin to the arcade games it is inspired by), that some of the missions are WAY more difficult to complete than others (completing them all is necessary to unlock the final, super hard true boss fight) and that sometimes the screen is so full of elements -bullets, explosions, effects, bonuses and background flashy elements- that is hard to keep track of everything, leading to loss of lives for no fault of our own (the confetti that appear in the stages after ompleting the game once make everything even more annoying). All in all I really enjoyed it and I'm disappointed that the sequel promised by the ending is still nowhere to be seen...