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- Price: $0.99 (Get it)
- Version: 1.0
- Official Site: Tumbleweed Interactive
A while back, I described Skybound as looking like “Yoshi Touch & Go in reverse.” While the games share the same basic mechanics — “Draw clouds,” basically — Skybound more deftly executes Touch & Go’s gameplay concepts, and ultimately emerges as the better game.
In Skybound, you must guide and protect a ball as it makes an endless skyward ascent. To do this, you need to draw lines of clouds underneath the ball. Each time the ball touches your clouds, it will bounce upward slightly, and will follow whatever angle you have drawn.
Along the way, you’ll encounter several power-ups and obstacles. Some will make your ball rise faster with every bounce, while others will make it temporarily heavier. These elements work together to create a tension-filled game, as one miscalculated angle or unexpected item pick-up can result in the ball dropping off the bottom of the screen, after which the game ends.
Skybound’s single default level layout is fun at first, but can become frustrating, as any simple mistake will send you all the way back to the beginning. Thankfully, Skybound has more to offer than its main endless gameplay mode. Once you reach a certain height in the main mode, you’ll unlock a boss mode, which features a variety of enemy characters to defeat as your ball travels skyward. This mode adds a fun spin on the core gameplay, and gives Skybound needed depth.
Skybounds “challenges” system also provides further replay incentive. As you earn higher scores and collect bonus items hidden throughout the main endless mode, you’ll unlock trophies and bonus modes as a reward for your efforts. This is a smart addition, as Skybound’s single unchanging level layout would otherwise grow stale quickly.
As it is, however, Skybound is a game of reflexes and memorization. The challenges give just enough incentive to make you want to keep playing to earn higher scores, even after frustration sets in. It could use a little more depth or perhaps more levels (or, ideally, a random level generator), but for what it is, Skybound gives you way more than 99 cents worth of entertainment.
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