There are certain game developers who I wish could get a blank check to do whatever they wanted. Give Strange Scaffold’s Xalavier Nelson Jr. a billion dollars and just let the guy cook. Neil Jones, better known as Aerial Knight, is near the top of that list. Knight makes action games that feel bigger than their constraints. 2021’s Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield imbued your typical auto-runner with slow-motion parkour thrills. (You could say that it paved the way for this year’s excellent Relooted.) It was a minimalist Mirror’s Edge, getting to the essence and style of a good action movie without the blockbuster budget. It wasn’t the biggest or most refined game out there, but it did a lot with a little and left your brain enough space to fill in any gaps.
Knight has pulled that trick again with his latest project, Aerial_Knight’s DropShot. The bite-sized action game takes a typical Mission: Impossible stunt and builds a simple, snappy shooter around it. Even if it lacks depth and features a few puzzling design choices, DropShot once again finds Knight dissecting a larger-than-life movie setpiece and siphoning every last drop of adrenaline out of the thumping heart at the center.
If Never Yield was an auto-scroller, DropShot is an auto-faller. You play as Smoke Wallace, a dragon hunter whose weapon of choice is his literal finger guns. There’s not much more to the story setup; all you need to know is that you’re skydiving out of planes and shooting both falling rivals and winged beasts. You’re Tom Cruise performing multiple takes of the same stunt over a brisk three hours’ worth of 30- to 90-second levels.
All you really have to do in each level is survive the freefall to the ground below by shooting everything around you from a first-person perspective. Successfully killing every enemy on the way down will net you a better final score, but will also require you to shoot carefully. Smoke’s fingers only have a certain number of shots, and he can only reload by shooting or meleeing balloons strewn throughout his path. There are speed rings to fall through, temporary power-ups to grab, and lots of floating debris to maneuver around, but you’re mostly trying to puzzle out how to land every kill in a level.
DropShot takes a great stunt and asks what parts of it are essential to the spectacle.
It’s a simple premise that’s focused on nailing its fundamental thrill above all else. DropShot gets across its freefalling sensation immediately, making you feel the resistance of the wind as you pivot left and right to take aim at enemies bobbling in the air around you. Each shot hits its target with a jolt of crisp feedback that makes it feel like you’re packing elephant guns under your gloves. That’s all it takes to put you in the shoes of a daredevil stuntman without the need for expensive visuals.
Getting that core down is crucial, because the edges are where the idea gets rough. If you drift too far outside an invisible boundary, you only have a few seconds to get back inside the play area before forfeiting a stage. It’s hard to determine where exactly that line is without a visual indication, which meant that I ended up wasting a few levels when I couldn’t get back on track. More puzzling is that elements like boost rings, which pop up in some boss-encounter race sequences, are sometimes positioned outside of that boundary. Power-ups don’t always make sense either. When you grab one, you activate a random ability that triggers instantly. (Spawning multiple arms, speeding forward on a dragon, tossing rubber ducky bombs, etc.) Oftentimes you’ll grab one that triggers a powerful attack meant to take out multiple enemies at once… but there’s no one around you to use it on.
Decisions like that hold DropShot back from totally hitting its mark, but I once again find myself appreciating what Knight pulls off here with such a focused concept. He’s connecting the dots between film and video game action, finding where those two mediums intersect. Yes, it feels like playing a splashy action-movie setpiece, but it’s also very much a modern spin on Space Harrier too. Abstract the action and you’ll find a classic space shoot ’em up where you fly through the air and plink away at the enemies in your path. It’s classical in a way that makes you appreciate how so many older games with limited tech behind them were able to captivate players just the same as a splashy blockbuster.
I’d love to see what Aerial Knight could do with a billion dollars, sure, but it’s the limitations that make his work meaningful. DropShot takes a great stunt and asks what parts of it are essential to the spectacle. In stripping it down to its essence, Knight finds a shared connection between two artistic mediums that love to get our blood pumping.
Aerial_Knight’s DropShotis out now on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a prerelease download code provided by Aerial_Knight.You can findadditional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
