Big Sky Trooper

"Obscure, and with good reason."

Not everything LucasArts touches turns to gold. This game came out, with zero fanfare, back in the mid-90s and vanished without a trace. It shouldn't come as too much of a pity, though. After all, not everything LucasArts touches is good, either.

Opening Screens: 6/10

Stick around for a few moments when the LucasArts logo appears and you'll see a little skit involving two villain characters - a slug, and the final boss. It seems the slugs hate skeletal systems and advertising, and so the logo is blown to smithereens for the sin of having both. Amusing, and the only time most players will see the final boss. But when your opening screens are the best part...

Plot: 4/10

Mankind is waging a war against the alien creatures known as the Slugs, and their only option is to draft a brilliant general. So a sergeant picks your character out of the applicants, makes you a general, and sends you out to fight the good fight. (Later on, you learn that for picking you, the sergeant was demoted in rank.) Early in the game, you learn that mankind is losing this war, because the Slugs have located the machines that control the universe and are sabotaging them, threatening the universe as we know it... And I've summed up the entire plot in four sentences without leaving out a single twist, so that's how many points I'll give it. From the company that gave us Monkey Island, this is just disappointing.

Our Hero: 3/10

What hero? You name them and you pick whether it's a boy or a girl, but you learn absolutely nothing about the character other than it exists. You're playing a nobody, a soulless automaton who has no history or family. I suppose you can project yourself on the character, but why would you want to? Again, LucasArts disappoints us.

Graphics: 6/10

Vibrant, colorful, and you're not about to lose your enemies against the landscape. There are only a few types of location, repeated over and over again, but each one is well-drawn. The characters are somewhat overly large-eyed, though. Still, at least your eyes won't get bored in some of the longer areas.

Music: 6/10

It's background music, and trust me, it stays in the background - you can barely hear it most of the time. What there is of it fits the situation - calming for your ship, threatening for space battles, rousing for planets, and mysterious for the universe-controlling Machines. You won't want to download them into your MP3 player, but your ears won't bleed either.

Controls: 4/10

It's a top-down scrolling shooter, a little like a less-active Smash TV. You can use equipped items with X, shoot with one button, and move in eight directions... or you're supposed to. Trouble is, enemies can come in any direction, but if you move diagonally you move slower than the cardinal directions. This means that if you're attacked in a diagonal direction, you can't respond as quickly as if you're attacked from the other four. Controls during the ship-battle segments are pretty lousy, as well: you move like a tank (turn with left/right, move with up), but because it's space, you'll drift, and you'll usually drift right into enemy fire. The word "sloppy" sums it up nicely.

Enemies: 3/10

You're fighting the Slug armies, and that's about it. If you're looking for variety in your enemies, look elsewhere. You're fighting slugs, slugs, and more slugs.

Gameplay and Difficulty: 1/10

Here's where the game moves from mediocre to bad. Gameplay follows a certain pattern.

First, you go to a world. After fighting off the Slug fighters surrounding that planet (which goes quickly from laughably easy to "Oh cripes, here they come!"), you're sent down to the planet and must hunt down the Slugs infesting it. Once they're all dead, the planet's clear for the time being. (Slugs can return to cleared planets, unless there's a fast food franchise on it - they hate fast food.) After that's done, you need to set up a spy satellite so you can reach other worlds. (You have a limited number of these satellites - theoretically, you can build more, but it's a time-consuming task.)

In some cases, you must crawl through the innards of the Machines, fighting off the Slugs and fixing them at the demands of the old men who built them. This is done by finding something, bringing it back, being sent to find something else, and so on ad nauseum.

Why am I giving it such a low score? Because it never changes. You'll be doing the same things over and over again, with varying degrees of difficulty, until the game's over. You'll be doing them for slightly different reasons, but the base tasks never change. Ever.

And the game's difficulty doesn't come from requiring intelligent thought, or from requiring quick reflexes. It comes from how little it tells you. You see, you'll spend half of this game completely in the dark about what to do next. The Machines are gigantic, and much of the terrain in them looks the same, but the game won't give you a map, so you'll wander through them for literally hours on end, never quite sure where you are. Planets aren't so bad, but there the mindless repetition of what you do on them is quite enough.

And I should note one thing - I've never beaten this game. There is a point where the game gives you an objective... and no clues what to do or how to complete it. After trying absolutely everything I could think of, I tossed the game aside for good.

Overall: 3/10

Good design, awful core. It's like eating a worm-infested apple - you can't tell there's something wrong until you're too late to escape it. Do not buy this game, do not download a ROM of it... in the end, ignore its existence.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 03/07/05