Ever since the Top Gun movie released, everyone loves Air Force fighter jets. Even now, it is one of my favorite classic movies (as well as Charlie Sheen’s parody, Hot Shots). I imagine that is hard to translate the action into a video game. Sky Gamblers Afterburner is not based in that movie, but ever since the phenomena, Afterburner is now a memory of a time long gone. Flight combat simulators are a genre that is kind of scarce–at least on Nintendo Switch. Sky Gamblers Afterburner is a game that tries to fill in the gap for this genre, but it feels that is a gap too wide to fill.
In Sky Gamblers, the story mode you play as a pilot of a said group. In one routine exercise against drones, things take a turn for the worse when the drones (that were supposed to be just shooting targets) fire back and start to take one by one the members of your team. Eventually, you succeed and uncover a plan to destroy America by an admiral that went rogue.
The plot here isn’t going to win any awards, and it gives an excuse to shoot down every enemy on sight across 15 missions that have locales like San Francisco and the Hoover Dam. Each mission has a particular objective like taking down enemy planes or protect civilians.
If you are not familiar with this genre, there is a tutorial mode. Sadly, it covers only the bare basics of plane control and a HUD explanation, but no mention of combat specific controls, like how to shoot, how to use missiles, or even how to do a quick turn instead of using the way it is shown on the tutorial. I had to discover that on my own. Pressing the D-pad (or the joycon’s terrible pad) buttons, you can do a series of rolls and quick turns. With L and ZL, you can use the afterburner and anti missile flares. With R and ZR, you can shoot your main weapon and missiles, and if you hold the missile button, the camera follows it until it hits the target. This kind of information should’ve been on the “Tutorial” if this was a flying simulator like Pilot Wings. It makes sense to omit this information, but it’s not. The developer should’ve invested a little more time to give a proper tutorial to the game.
Now, about the game difficulty itself. It is not that bad. There are checkpoints in each area, and if your plane gets destroyed, you have the option to start over from the beginning or from the last checkpoint. This is particularly good since your plane’s health is not recoverable. Once your health is depleted and you press B to eject from the plane, it is over and you restart from the last checkpoint reached or the beginning of the stage. However, since your firepower is always vastly superior, you won’t be repeating the missions much.
For those who like to unlock things, after each mission you earn cash and you can use it to unlock more planes. There are several to unlock and follow a pattern until you unlock the most powerful plane. \
The game graphically looks good. When you are flying, I like how the landscape looks. You can see some weird textures when flying too close from the ground but most of the time these are barely noticeable.
The sound effects are really good the shoots ricocheting have that cool metal hitting sound and the missiles feel great when launching. I would’ve like some kind of music, since the engine noises tend to bore me after a while.
There is also online multiplayer, but I was never able to get someone to play with. It’s a shame since I would’ve love to have a couple of dogfights with fellow pilots.
Bottom Line: Sky Gamblers Afterburner took the gamble to try to fill the gap of games in the genre, and somehow I don’t see that gamble pulling off. The game is not bad; I had fun with it, and I consider myself a casual player for this genre. For casuals like me, there is fun to be had, but I couldn’t recommend it to more experienced players in the genre.
A Review Code was provided for this review.