The legendary arcade shoot-em-up Sonic Wings, better known to us in the West as Aero Fighters, is making a comeback after more than 25 years!
The year is 20XX, the world is in danger from a mysterious organization called "Fata Morgana," which is attacking metropolises around the globe. The only thing standing between them and world domination is "Project Blue," an international secret agency that gathers the eight best pilots in the world at your disposal (plus two more that you can unlock). The characters are colorful and some are truly bizarre, like a dolphin named Whity, and the Russian twins Chaika and Pushka.
You can play in two-player mode, and if you play solo, you have the option to choose a wingman, which gives you access to their special weapon; each of them has different abilities, and you can choose which combination you prefer. Personally, I prefer Kotomi and Mao Mao. Each character has their own story and reason for joining the fight, which you will discover as you progress through the game, and different character combinations provide different dialogues, sometimes comedic and sometimes quite bizarre.
The battles take place across 8 scenarios: there are Tokyo, Barcelona, Abu Dhabi, the Arctic Ocean, and other locations around the world. Each level ends with a boss fight, featuring a massive super weapon - a tank, an aircraft carrier, a space shuttle, or an armored fortress.
As I mentioned, each pilot has different basic weapons, which you can upgrade up to level 5. When you die, you lose all upgrades and start again from the first level, but you get all your special bombs back. Special attacks vary greatly, from cluster bombs, a huge laser that scorches half the screen, EMP bombs, to a set of babushkas that circle the screen and destroy everything in their path, complete with inevitable captions in Russian: How are you? Friend and similar.
Fly through the levels, destroy enemy fleets, break through bullet storms while collecting points, and at the end of each level, you receive a bonus for the percentage of destroyed enemies, because after all, this is an arcade game and you want to collect as many points as possible!
Each level starts with the message "GIRD YOUR LOINS", and the last level feels like some bad LSD trip, with the final boss being a monkey flying on a rocket, and you have to destroy it before it escapes. If it escapes, a screen appears saying: "You let the boss escape, so Earth was destroyed. What the hell!" Quite bizarre.
Hmm, bizarre. I don't usually use this word often, and I've already written it several times in this text.
The game is made on the Unity engine and tries to give the impression of 2.5D depth. Although it is quite stable and has no stuttering or frame rate drops, the background graphics are sometimes quite poor and look like they were taken from some mobile game. Enemy projectiles will occasionally completely blend into the background and are impossible to avoid because you can't see them.
As for the sound, the music is energetic and plays on the nostalgia card as they included remixes from previous installments, and the characters have their thematic musical backgrounds. On the other hand, the sound effects are weak; in a game where bullets, rockets, and bombs fly everywhere, you would expect the explosions to be dominant and loud. But they are not.
The game is not too difficult; aside from two additional characters that you can unlock, there is no other reason to play it after you finish it. However, you will often return to it and play it again and again. Both due to nostalgia for the times when you spent days in front of arcade machines and the desire to just improve your high score a little more.
A copy of the game for review purposes was provided by the publisher Red Art Games
