It works brilliantly, as falling back to the lower stages with a powerful ship means you make mincemeat of the enemies and challenges that seemed difficult can be completed with ease. By then your ship should be powerful enough to complete the stage that was previously too hard. This means that when one of the higher numbered stages becomes too challenging you can fall back to an earlier level on a harder difficulty level, grind that and complete the challenges. Complete the challenges for the hard stage and you unlock the insane version of the stage which awards triple stars. Completing the four challenges for each stage, which include destroying 100% of all enemies and collecting all the humans that are dotted around the landscape, will unlock a hard version of the stage with more bullets flying around the screen and double the amount of stars as your reward. Every time you play a stage you will progress just a little, achieving more goals, and collecting just enough stars to power up your ship just a little more, allowing you to progress a little bit further. This is where the grind comes in, but it’s superbly balanced. It’s all the usual stuff, and each addition to your ship can be powered up many times. The stars can be used to boost your main weapon, add side cannons, homing missiles, shields, lasers, smart bombs, and so on. ![]() In the iOS game you could buy packs of stars to speed things up, but thankfully there are no microtransactions in the game and you wouldn’t need them anyway. You can then pop back to your hangar and spend the stars to improve your ship. However, it’s just strong enough to get you part way through the level, during which destroyed enemies will release stars for you to collect. Your ship is utterly pathetic to begin with and, to paraphrase the 1994 dance classic “Short D*ck Man” by 20 Fingers, “That has got to be the smallest laser I have ever seen in my whole life!” It’s barely a pixel wide and does about as much damage as being attacked with ping-pong balls. The game is a vertical scrolling shoot ’em up with enemies attacking you from land, air, and sea as you relentlessly scroll upwards to the end of level boss battle. Not looking good is it? And what if I tell you this is a shoot ’em up that makes you grind, repeating the same levels over and over? It really, really should be utterly awful, but it’s not, it’s bloody fantastic. It’s a shoot ’em up, a genre that has been generally stale for decades, it’s made by iDreams, the team behind Let’s Create Pottery on iOS, it’s a sequel to a game that’s over ten years old, and yes, it’s a conversion of a mobile game which had in-app purchase. The setup for these levels is exactly the same in terms of what to buy, just remember to save shield/lasers/bombs for the boss if you choose level 7 because it can be a pain to kill without them, especially on nightmare.On paper everything about Sky Force Reloaded would suggest it’s not going to be great. If level 8 isn't your style, i found that Level 6 or 7 on Nightmare difficulty also gave a fairly good chance of a card. It is also worth continuing the level even if you don't find a card, since you will still need stars for the 500,000 star achievement anyway. The cost of grinding this level will not be an issue however, since you will obtain approximately 2,500 to 3,000 Stars per run, which will double to 5,000 to 6,000 Stars per run once you unlock the double star card. Start the level by buying 4 shields, 4 lasers and 2 bombs which will cost around 3,250 Stars (slightly less if you have cards that provide an initial shield, laser or bomb). I would suggest Nightmare on level 8 if you are able to clear 100% of the enemies on insane, but i found that they have way too much health to manage this for myself. I found that Level 8 on insane difficulty was a very good level to grind for all of the cards. This works up to Insane difficulty (Normal > Hard > Insane) until you complete level 8 which will allow access to Nightmare difficulty (provided you have all medals on insane). ![]() A short preface to the guide: Difficulties in this game can be unlocked by obtaining all of the medals in the previous difficulty.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |