Man oh man, did this game soar in
under the radar or what? Lethal Skies Elite Pilot: Team SW, or Lethal Skies for short and
LS as its friends call it (Ill just call it Lethal Skies), is a combat flight sim
with a supposedly arcade feel. When I think arcade, I think fast, easy, and fun. Lethal
Skies satisfies none of those three criteria and I find myself wishing it had been shot
down before it could have even attempted a shaky two-point landing into my PS2.The story in
Lethal Skies presents a world where environmental destruction is proceeding at an
accelerated rate. The ice caps have melted and flooded coastal cities. The Statue of
Liberty is up to her armpits in water at New York, and Los Angeles has been rebuilt on top
of giant floating hexagonal platforms. Even in areas not effected by the flooding, the
destruction of nuclear energy plants and oil refineries by tsunamis rendered much the
remaining dry land a lifeless, polluted wasteland. Terrorism and civil war broke out
between countries that could afford to build floating cities and those who couldnt.
At the head of these outbreaks of violence is the World Order Reorganization Front or
WORF. Opposing WORF is the World Alliance and your team of crack pilots known as Team SW.
Team SW must fight WORF on land, air, and at sea in order to stop its bid for world
domination. Rock on.
As far as
the actual game play is concerned, Lethal Skies has what you would expect. There are
escort missions, strike missions and interception missions all set in various places
around the world. There is even a "fly through narrow canyon while avoiding enemy
radar" mission, which seems to have become mandatory in this type of game. Lethal
Skies is being called an arcade combat flight experience, but it seems they just called it
"arcade" because it they didnt know what to classify it as since it
obviously isnt a simulation. As was mentioned above, arcade-ish games usually have
three things going for them. They are fast, easy, and fun. Lethal Skies is lethargic at
best, not providing a good sense of speed, and it always feels as if your fighter is going
to fall right out of the sky. Lethal Skies is also horrendously, unnecessarily difficult
at times and because of this fact, Lethal Skies isnt all that fun.
Some things are more difficult than others, of course. Landing is fairly easy;
though having to replay a difficult mission because you blow the landing is frustrating as
hell. Fighting enemies is made difficult in two ways. The on-screen radar is pretty much
worthless and the enemy indicator arrow that appears in the middle of the screen and
points in the direction of the nearest enemy is far too slow. The second reason why
fighting the enemies is difficult is that your missiles never seem to lock on quick enough
and they dont have enough pow in them to do the job in one shot. Youll find
yourself making several runs on ground targets, which is a frustrating and time consuming
activity. Luckily, aerial targets usually fall with just one shot. The final and most
damming aspect of Lethal Skies is how ridiculously quickly you run out of fuel. This makes
the game a battle against your own gas guzzling jet rather than against the evil minions
of WORF.
Fuel is consumed at such a surprisingly rapid rate in Lethal Skies that
missions will end with you running out of gas far more often than actually getting blown
up by the enemy. This is a big, frustrating part of the last few missions. What is worse
is that in some missions you are required to do an in-flight refueling. This means finding
the fuel tanker using the dinky radar and then matching the damn thing move for move. The
controls are a bit touchy and a tiny bit of pressure on the stick in the wrong direction
can screw everything up. Using the flaps (controlled with the L2 and R2 buttons) makes
this a bit easier, but still not much fun. These missions are torture and only sour you
even more on a decidedly average game.
There is a training mode along with the story mode game, but the training
offered isnt all that useful. You learn how to land and dogfight, but those things
are easily enough learned in the first mission of story mode. It would have been better if
the game offered an in-flight refueling practice mission but, alas, no such luck.
Graphically, Lethal Skies gets the job done. The jets are nicely detailed, but
the explosions dont look as good as they should. In a game where the main focus is
blowing stuff up, youd think they would make the explosions themselves look
spectacular. Not here. There are a couple neat effects you can choose to turn on at the
options screen. There is a motion blur effect with variable intensity levels that looks
rather neat. It makes the game almost unplayable though. The other effect is a g-force
effect. It makes the Dual Shock 2 rumble when you are pulling a few gs and also
tints the screen red or black, simulating the blood rushing to your head or you starting
to black out due to the g-forces.
The sound is a bit disappointing: house music consisting of heavy guitar with
some funky jungle beats thrown in for who knows what reason. The jet engine noises are
just way off the mark. They sound like an old 70 horsepower Subaru struggling up a steep
hill rather the massively powerful, high pitched whine we are all familiar with. Racing
games are guilty of this all of the time. They give us piddly little muted engine noises
and pump their generic guitar laden house music at us instead. Give me a loud, whiny F1
engine, give me a throaty four-stroke motorcycle engine on supercross games, and for
craps sake, give me a jet engine that sounds like a jet engine. It isnt that
difficult and would add immensely to the world that developers are trying so hard to
create.
Overall, Lethal Skies Elite Pilot: Team SW is a very average game. Decent
looks, but average sounds and average game play. I would have enjoyed it much more had the
focus of so many missions not been on either running out of fuel or having to re-fuel in
midair. Games are supposed to be fun, not give you an ulcer because you are worried about
the fuel mileage your jet gets. I will say that flying just a few meters above the
breaking surf or doing barrel rolls and other maneuvers trying to make yourself sick is
kind of fun for a while. Diving towards the ground going full throttle and pulling up just
in time is fairly satisfying as well. I say give Lethal Skies a rental and do some barrel
rolls and try to make yourself sick for a couple days. Fans of the genre might like it
much more.