Wild Blue Skies tries its best to capture what makes Star Fox so great, but doesn’t connect in the same way.
The indie modernization of classic game genres is nothing new, and Wild Blue Skies hopes to continue the trend by revitalizing arcade on rails shooters from the 90s. This nostalgic trip attempts a revitalizing of an icon, but It’s unfortunately a cover song with not many instruments changed out.
A young dog named Bowie must take himself and his pack of anthropomorphic fighter pilots, The Blue Bombers, on missions to fight back the conquering force of the exiled evil Dr. Grimclaw. While protecting your squad, pilots will encounter rival squads and locate alternate routes through missions. Stop me when this starts to sound familiar. Things start to take an even more recognizable turn as most levels and situations are lifted almost wholesale from the source material. One level inexplicably features search lights on open water. No line of dialogue or level briefings even mentions why those lights are there. But the source material features a level with open water and searchlights, that when destroyed, lead to an alternative route, so this game needs it too! The squads identities are unsurprisingly similar, but it’s hard to identify who’s supposed to be based on who because of the script reading. Thorne a yellow dinosaur/lizard comes across as both the nerdy fumbling tech engineer and the overly cocky ace pilot, sometimes in the same mission. Begging the player for help when moments later taunting them because they aren’t skilled enough to fly like them. Star Wo…. I mean “The Prowlers” or the rival squad doesn’t appear to have any real beef with the Blue Bombers. In my numerous encounters with them, the only form of friction I could find is one of the the Prowlers mentioned one time that the evil doctor was his dad, this was accross my 20 or so encounters with them in 3 or 4 different missions. (I’m still not convinced “The Prowlers” are called that in game. Steam is the only place I found mention of the name)
Flying is the only modernization to the gameplay systems, and even that caused unintentional problems throughout the experience. Breaking now works like shutting off the ship completely, causing it to fall from the sky and lose flight control. In open flight sections, this allows players to turn on a dime and immediately react to a threat behind them. However this also makes precise movement in the on rail sections more difficult because any activation of the break hinders your ability to quickly move across the screen. The quick 180 also becomes pointless when enemy ai is allowed to fly straight through sold objects, meaning their best way to “avoid” you is to fly through a physical object you can’t. Arcade concepts have even been stripped from the game, making health pickups extremely rare and seemingly impossible to calculate when and where they appear. This randomness can feel insulting when you go through one mission that drops them every few enemies to another that for some reason doesn’t drop any on that playthrough. This inconsistency leads to frustrating deaths since almost every hit on standard requires 2 healing items to amount to the same as one hit of damage.
Wild Blue Skies finds itself in a hard place. This genre seemingly crawled out of its coffin recently to the delight of many. Unfortunately this love letter reads more like a school book report that left the Spark Notes links in the margins. Wild Blue Skies is available now on Steam, XBOX, PS5 and later in Fall 2026 for Switch.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. This video first appeared on The SideQuest Live for August 16, 2026.
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