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BIG SKY INFINITY
Platform: PlayStation 3
64

Big Sky Infinity Review

Procedural Pandemonium

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Drilling is a curious addition. It allows your ship to penetrate screen-wide planets that intermittently appear, as well as the shells of a couple of the bosses. In practicality, though, it’s not a very interesting feature. You’re typically given ample warning when planets approach, so the matter of pressing the drill button becomes so trivial as to seem wholly unnecessary. One might expect that the drill might serve as a means of defeating enemies, thereby establishing the sort of dual-technique system found in genre standouts like Einhander or Ikaruga. But that’s a feature that’s limited to your charge-up “spin” drill attack, a limited-use weapon that’s effective against most enemies. Now, you might be wondering why I consider the two to be separate entities - if the drill can indeed be charged up to defeat baddies, then isn’t my earlier point about its lack of utility invalid? But strangely, the charge up move doesn’t work like the regular drill move does. Hit a planet, asteroid, or other such impassable object while using the spin attack, and you’ll be just as dead as if you flew headlong into it with your Prius. It’s a counter-intuitive design choice, and one of my largest sources of death. It’s tragically easy to crash into a tiny, one-hit-kill asteroid when you’re flitting about the screen, trying to destroy enemies with your drill attack. To compound the problem, there’s no timer cue on the spin move, so it often wears out just as you move to plough through an enemy.

Big Sky Infinity

While there’s really only one “level” in the game, the procedural generation does manage to keep the experience fresh by constantly switching up your encounters on the fly, so that no two runs are alike. While I do think that randomness largely serves the game well, know that it can occasionally frustrate. In fitting arcade fashion, Big Sky Infinity’s end game is the all-important high score, so it can be grating when the game’s algorithms don’t serve you up the right enemies or bonuses to top off your performance on a good run. Thankfully, if any one attempt gets you down, there's a solid offering of alternate game modes available that pepper in challenges like arcade modes, no-weapons runs, and boss rushes. Classic, the de facto "main" mode, lets you improve your ship after each run, using collected starbits towards upgrades to your shields and an arsenal of indirect lasers. They’re a welcome addition, and after some work you’ll gradually notice the subtle effects that they have on your performance. Upgrades cost an exponentially increasing number of starbits as they improve along their sliders, so it looks to take quite a bit of work to max out your craft.

Big Sky Infinity

But surprisingly, upgrade systems and performance tracking don’t stop Big Sky Infinity from lacking a tangible sense of progression or accomplishment. Since you’re essentially limited to one extended level, the sense of familiarity with the environment grows until it becomes a bit dull. And though every run is different by some measure, on the grander scale the sameness of the general experience begins to wear you down. It's telling, for example, that the graphs representing each of your attempts are indistinguishable from game to game. Invariably, mine always end up looking like a gently sloped line that peaks suddenly, then ends. That's not to say that Big Sky Infinity needs levels, but some fiddling with the presentation could really have helped to engender feelings of accomplishment. Terry Cavanaugh's Super Hexagon, for example, achieved this by going out of its way to highlight the seconds that players survived, as well as calling out levels of progression as they advanced. By contrast, Big Sky Infinity feels inscrutable. It's difficult to judge exactly how the difficulty is scaling to your abilities, and the de facto signifiers of performance, your score and multiplier, are tucked into a corner where you'll never look when the action starts to really heat up.

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Big Sky Infinity
Big Sky Infinity box art Platform:
PlayStation 3
Our Review of Big Sky Infinity
64%
Adequate
The Verdict:
Game Ranking
Big Sky Infinity is ranked #1508 out of 1957 total reviewed games. It is ranked #118 out of 145 games reviewed in 2012.
1507. Medieval Moves
PlayStation 3
1508. Big Sky Infinity
1509. Payday 2
PC
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Screenshots

Big Sky Infinity
12 images added Feb 2, 2013 16:39
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