by Easily one of the more adorable iOS game offerings of late, Sky Tourist certainly doesn’t skimp on innovation. A young boy’s airborne journey through a diverse medley of colorful cosmic realms – while tethered to twin rockets – proves to be a wild and imaginative ride. But beneath its bubbly charm and unique ideas, frustration lurks throughout this upward adventure, waiting to pounce right at the moments when you’re starting to have fun.
Sky Tourist hooks you from the get-go, but gradually unhinges shortly after liftoff. In each vertical stage, you have to maneuver your spacesuit-clad young lad through winding obstacles and puzzles while collecting little cubes to progress. The neat part is that he’s hanging from a cable that’s suspended between rockets situated on the left and right sides of the screen. By using your thumbs to slide the rockets upwards, downwards, and at various angles, you’ll jostle and move the little fellow along according to gravity and your velocity. It’s a very cool system in concept, though fiddly controls and the fact that your zip line is prone to snapping with the slightest snag makes it tough to fully enjoy.
Each world boasts a beautiful thematic art style and slick soundtrack to support its clever (and sometimes insidious) stage designs. Aside from avoiding spikes and monsters, puzzles have you flipping switches, pushing blocks, tinkering with gates, and fiddling with the landscape. The difficulty ramps up rather quickly, but that’s more due to the twitchy controls than figuring out what needs to be done. Performance issues further weigh down the fun, as intermittent slowdown at inopportune moments can throw tricky maneuvers into a tailspin, forcing you to restart from the last checkpoint. The good news is that liberally spaced checkpoints make progression possible despite the sporadic snags.
The bottom line. Sky Tourist is delightfully unique and blast to play when it works, but be prepared to muddle through some irksome moments as you push into this interesting, but shakily-executed adventure.
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