Flightpath is a new top down vertical shoot ’em up, developed by Illogic Games, and published by eastasiasoft. It’s currently available on PS4/PS5, Switch, and Xbox Series X/S – PS5 version used for this review.
Whenever I review a game, I’m always hyper conscious of everything that is happening. I try and take notes of what’s going on, things I like and don’t like, little bits I notice and my general impressions. I’ve always found it a good rule of thumb if I end up forgetting I’m supposed to be reviewing a game, and end up just enjoying myself – and that’s what happened with Flightpath.
Flightpath doesn’t make very good first impressions. It’s an indie title so you can’t expect the world, but the game starts off with a fairly barebones menu, followed by a character selection screen and an introduction. The cutscenes in the game use 2D drawn pictures, with some very basic animations. The anime art itself is quite nice, however it is quite low resolution and often poorly cropped, and the background graphics of each scene are even muddier.
Of the three characters available, I picked the engineer, and her story started by being accosted by some goons in the flower shop she runs with her partner Marie. After swotting them away, the game starts by throwing you in your ship as you hunt them down in a junkyard and get revenge. The in-game graphics are quite basic. It’s mostly 3D polygons with flat textures for the enemies, and some basic textures for the backgrounds and bigger elements. You start off with a weak machine-gun, and the game gets off to something of a slow start.
After a while, you reach a shop, and you can start to apply upgrades to your ship. There are loads of different weapons to pick from, and you can upgrade your shields, armour and generators too. Defeating enemies grants currencies which are used for these upgrades at the shop, as there’s no upgrades found within the levels themselves.
After a level or two, and upgrading the ship a bit, things started to click. I started to find the graphics quite charming in a retro-modern kind of way. The story about chasing down these goons over a nonsensical fictional collection of planets started to be quite humorous, and the action got a lot better. As the amount of enemies increased and bullets started filling the screen, it got more intense, and more fun. I started finding myself forgetting about the review and just enjoying playing through this barebones no-nonsense shoot ’em up. It was great, and I played through the full ten levels.
There’s some replayability to be found here. Of the three characters each has a slightly different story, and there are branching paths within each level which result in different outcomes depending on the flightpath you take. There’s also an endless mode for the survivor amongst you. Performance was good, and I didn’t notice any slowdown, with it controlling well the entire playthrough. I think on PS5 and Series X it would have been good to see a 120hz mode, I’m sure the systems could take it.
One part of Flightpath did chafe on me a little. When you die, instead of respawning at the start of the level or a checkpoint, you are sent back to the repair shop. Here, the mechanic gives you a side quest level you have to complete before you can retry where you left off. These usually take four or five minutes, but net you extra money you can use to upgrade your ship to hopefully overcome the level. Towards the end of the game when you’re fully upgraded these got annoying fast, and I wish there was a way to skip them if you didn’t need the money.
Overall though, I liked the time I spent with Flightpath. It’s not perfect and its definitely rough around the edges, but there is a great deal of fun to be had here. If you’re not too critical and want to just relax and have some old school gaming fun for a few hours, you could do far worse.
You can purchase Flightpath on various systems, information can be found here. If you’re after a PC shooter, perhaps check out Godrop.
