Mediatonic | Jan 31, 2011
Earth is under attack by aliens from another dimension! Who can protect it? Why, the Defender of Earth! But why did he let them get to Earth in the first place? Well, he’s on trial to find out.
Who’s That Flying!? has the player take control of the defender of Earth as he recounts his exploits in defending Earth from evil invaders to a trial of his peers. His peers being, the Defenders of the other planets. For the most part, the trial dialogue though is between Jupiter, who serves as the Judge, Earth, defending himself, and Uranus, who is a little pissy about being stuck being named Uranus. The story follows the trial, which is mostly Earth “describing” how he saved each city, then follows the epilogue of the trial through one additional stage.
The game itself is a side scrolling shoot’em up game. There are 5 cities each with 3 stages to play through, the stages are somewhat themed by the theme of larger monster that shows up. The design of the game is actually a bit simple as each stages features the same smaller black blog enemies, one medium sized “theme enemy” and a larger more difficult to kill version of the theme enemy.
There is a bit of a twist in the gameplay that helps to differentiate this game from traditional shooter games, Your character is 100% indestructible. So hey, that kind of ruins the challenge right? The city you’re defending has health. The more enemies you fail to destroy, the more health the city loses. This very strongly encourages the idea of killing everything, which can be tricky. Most of the larger special enemies of the stages are designed to keep you from killing the smaller black monster enemies. They will charge you and cause you to get confused, or spit goop at you to keep you temporarily immobilized.
There are also some special moves at your disposal. The more enemies you kill without letting any pass, you’ll charge up to unleash Rapid Fire shots, a laser like Super shot or the kill everything Hyper shot. Miss one enemy and your charge bar drops to nothing, which is a little frustrating. It can also be extremely killer when you lose it just as a large batch of enemies shows up.
The game itself is alight, though it is a bit simplistic in it’s design. The simplistic enemies is kind of nice, it never gets overly difficult, but often most levels break down to sweeping up and down across the screen shooting constantly. The cut scenes are neat, though the humor isn’t quite as funny as it wants to think it is. It’s not a terrible game by any means, though it also doesn’t really give too much to get super excited over unless you’re a real fan of shoot’em up games.
You can find Who’s That Flying?! on Steam here. it is also available in iOS.
