Glitchskier is a simple iOS arcade shooter oozing with aesthetics. While the gameplay is perfectly fine, I found it a bit too shallow to give it that much more time. What I really liked about this game was everything surrounding the core gameplay loop of shooting around and collecting powerups, but I still had a good time. I kinda wish there was more to it, some kind of secret metagame or story, but oh well!
I love fake operating systems in games, so when this one started on a fake BIOS boot sequence, I thought I was in for a treat. You are thrown on a fake computer screen with a few files that you can click around and drag. Only a small number, however. You only get credits and some flavor text, I was kinda bummed you couldn’t drag files into the /bin/ directory present. By launching Glitchskier.exe, you start the game proper. A small shooter where you drag your ship around, fire at enemies and collect power-ups. You lose your power-ups when you get hit (like in Mario) and there are a few options, like spinning lasers, charged beams, etc. By defeating enemies you collect currency and at some points you unlock different skins (color palettes) for the game.
And that’s my biggest problem with the game, is that this is everything that you do. If there’s a secret story, more gameplay modes, some stuff you unlock by doing certain things and the game goes in wild and weird glitch-ey directions, it doesn’t show it quickly enough. The core of the game is completely fine, but I wish it was in service of something more.
