Really Big Sky

Really Big Sky opens with a tutorial. The left stick moves your ship, the right stick fires, A button flips the drill and that's it. What does flipping the drill do? What is the aim of the game? How do you score points?

After a few seconds of playing, I die due to an unknown cause and am rewarded with a surprising amount of upgrade points to spend. I purchase some upgrades and try again, but survive for a similar amount of time; again, dying due to an unknown cause. In the third attempt, I last a few minutes, but at no point was I confident in deciding what could kill me, what I was supposed to collect, and what I should be avoiding.

As it turns out, when you are told a planet is approaching, you activate the drill, otherwise you die. When drilling, the red circles labelled bombs are actually a good thing, or at least they don't explode by drilling through them. Holding the drill button creates a powerful spinning attack which can be used to defeat the stronger enemies. The straight blue laser beams are gates which boost your multiplier when passing through. Collecting the blue fragments left behind by enemies are presumably the upgrade points. Pretty much everything else is an enemy to gun down, or a projectile to avoid.

As you play, the background is constantly changing colour, with various coloured streaks which also change in brightness and intensity. All this is disorienting and lacks clarity in regards to which objects are a threat and what is merely background.

The game is randomly generated, so you see different things each time you play and therefore cannot learn specific patterns. Bosses can appear but it's hard to learn their attack patterns given how easy it is to die.

There's a commentator whose existence is to provide humorous quips (“who ate all the pie-manufacturing planets?” when a large enemy appears). It's yet another way the game tries to be quirky. Even the menu options of Retry and Continue constantly change: Try Again/Enough, The Night Was Young/But I Was Too Tired To Go On and many other varieties. Although it's nice to see a bit of humour in the game, it is a bit confusing in terms of user interface design, especially if English isn't your first language.

There are a fair few game modes to unlock, which are essentially levels of difficulty. There's a few achievements to unlock too, but even most of these are obscure – 'Close Encounters' with the description 'Close Encounter', or 'Was Risky' with the description 'Be Risky'. It's anyone's guess how to unlock these. As you discover more of the enemies, they are added to the Library section. This gives you descriptive text but no image of the enemy it is describing; so even this feature is obscure!

Really Big Sky is one of those games that is too fancy for its own good. It just obfuscates the purpose of the game in an attempt to have style, but by doing so just ruins your fun.