It took a team of daring individuals to ask one of Earth’s most important questions – what if there was a kid, but in the sky?
By 1985, Namco hadn’t had a huge hit in a few years, and the industry was still reeling from the 1983 crash. As a survivor of the crash, they released a steady stream of arcade games in the mid-80s, doing fairly well by virtue of a lot of their competition being wiped out. Sky Kid is one of those. It was ported to the NES a couple of years after the arcade version, and it’s a moderately faithful adaptation.
The fact that you’re playing as a red “Baron” means, I assume, that you’re fighting to finally get rid of those dumb Brits and Americans once and for all. Your mission in each level is to drop a bomb on a big enemy fortress and then land, all while dodging numerous enemy planes and anti-air ground forces.
In addition to moving around, you’ve got one button to fire, and one to do a backwards loop-de-loop thing, which lets you cover retreat/dodge more quickly, and…you know what, I’m just gonna call it a barrel roll.
Your bomber plane does not take off with a bomb, so you instead need to pick one up while on your way to the target (you know, just like in real life). You can complete the level without it at the expense of points. You can also just pick up the bomb and drop it on something else if you want. In any case, once you’ve picked it up, you can’t barrel roll until you’ve released it. This makes movement quite a bit more difficult, as the barrel roll is handy for getting out of a lot of tight spots.
Also, and I feel like this should be stressed – per the game’s title, you’re a kid. Making bomber runs. Save for a somewhat upbeat soundtrack and bright color palette, there’s nothing especially kid-like about it. It’s weird.
So is Sky Kid any good? To sum it up – not really. It doesn’t do anything especially poorly, but it also doesn’t do anything super well. I like the idea behind the risk/reward of picking up the bomb, but in a lot of cases it’s best to just ignore the bomb entirely, which is unfortunate. I’ve talked in a lot of these about the importance of player movement feeling satisfying – it isn’t awful in Sky Kid, but there are a lot of times where you just don’t feel nimble enough to be effective. The gunplay is fine, but not super exciting. Overall, it’s aggressively mediocre, though if you’re a big fan of shoot ‘em ups, it’s probably at least worth a try.
Off the top of my head, this is the only horizontal shooter I can think of where the player always moves to the left. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about that, but it’s mildly interesting.
Several later Namco games made sly references to Sky Kid, particularly its mostly solid Ace Combat series. One of Pac-Man’s taunts in Super Smash Bros. even features the Red Baron himself:
Neat! It’s best not to think about where he keeps it.
We’ll be taking to the skies again for next week’s game, though we’ll be switching to another console (finally). Thanks, Retro Roulette wheel! I hope to see you then.