After some seriously intense gaming over the past few weeks, I decided to take a break and relax with the Xbox version of MySims: Sky Heroes.
The MySims series is a spin-off of EA’s juggernaut ‘The Sims’ franchise, aimed at providing more focused, structured games for younger audiences. Sky
Heroes is a fairly simple, straightforward air-action game where you fly cute, colourful fighter jets and participate in dogfights and races. It’s great fun for kids and more casual players — offering friendly, bright visuals, forgiving controls and a great number of ways to customise your planes and pilots.
In fact, I spent a lot of time in the creation screens, building and customising my plane with parts, decals, colour schemes and suchlike to build flying machines. There are a ton of customisation options for the pilots as well. These are mostly cosmetic, certainly, but they’re fun nevertheless — and you can be sure that almost no two players will end up creating identical avatars. Your creations also end up looking quite spiffy and cool — so there’s quite a bit of incentive to play with the customisation.
The gameplay is also enjoyable for younger and casual players — although it will quickly bore serious gamers. Your plane can participate in dogfights and air-races, swooping through the air, collecting a variety of power-ups and shooting down opponents. Think of it as an airborne version of Mario Kart (though much less hardcore). The controls are extremely forgiving (you can happily slam into walls, and the game will politely bounce you off them, no damage done) so that even people new to videogames shouldn’t have too much trouble mastering them.
The single-player modes are solid but unspectacular, and the story mode seems a little weak. The ‘rubberband’ racing AI
ensures that however badly you fly, your opponents never get too far ahead, giving you a chance to catch up. However, this also seems to make sure that you can never really open up a huge lead. It does make for exciting races, even if a little unfair. Again, this idea of ‘fairness’ may only matter to serious gamers — casual players primarily looking for an enjoyable experience may not care that much.
The most fun to be had with this game is in split-screen multiplayer with a friend — this is when the game’s shortcomings don’t matter as much. Both racing and dogfighting are enjoyable against a human opponent — which makes it a pity that it’s so hard to find players online. Of course, this state of affairs may change by the time you read this, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Sadly, you’re probably stuck with split-screen, so it’s a good thing that it works fairly well.
The ‘hardcore’ consoles do suffer from a lack of titles for younger children — with only a few notable titles (Viva Pinata, Little Big Planet, Ratchet and Clank) aimed at these age groups. In
India, where a considerable percentage of consoles are (perhaps misguidedly) purchased for kids, this causes those familiar situations where parents end up buying inappropriate games like GTA or God of War for kids too young to be playing them.
MySims Sky Heroes isn’t going to single-handedly address this issue, but it’s a decent enough game for parents looking for a nice, friendly, cartoon-violent
title for their kids to play. It’s probably a bit iffy to recommend it at full price, but considering the lack of choice in the genre, you could do worse.