Falco Sky 3

Although plenty of people get to fly nowadays, very few of them get a chance to pilot an airplane. The task requires a lot of training and a lot of money, not to mention the fact that you cannot really use your personal plane to go to work or visit your parents downtown. However, airplanes have been a great war tool for almost a century now, so they certainly have other uses.

Falco Sky 3 is an arcade flight sim in which you get to participate in dogfights and complete a handful of simple missions. There are no interesting new mechanics to tackle, nor any kind of revolutionary concepts that can keep you busy for hours. Even so, you can at least let yourself be distracted by the constant action and the decent graphics.

To begin with, there are multiple missions to choose from, although the objectives do not differ all that much. Your job is to destroy every other plane on the map, which is achieved by avoiding their shots and returning fire when you get the chance. Unfortunately, the flight mechanics are terrible, and the AI does not suffer from the same problem. Thus, the enemies are always behind you, while you have a very difficult time turning around.

You can use the mouse to control the aircraft, but it’s movements are fairly laggy and imprecise. This wouldn’t be too much of a problem if the rest of the planes had the same issue, but as mentioned before, the AI quickly turns and rotates around with with ease. This causes a lot of frustration, together with the fact that there are no other objectives to complete either.

The map design is yet another huge flaw, because the environments are cramped and unimpressive, which is not good news when you are flying above the ground. You quickly reach the limits of the maps and have to turn back, which is as annoying as it sounds. The level design itself is very lazy, even if the graphics quality would be decent enough to render exquisite environments.

When it’s all said and done, Falco Sky 3 fails to provide you with a good time, which is not what you expect from an arcade sim. Hence, the controls are terrible, the level design is laughable, and the AI is too unfair in most situations.