By Prope’s Rodea the Sky Soldier has been a long time coming. Announced back in 2011, it only saw its Japanese release earlier this year, with the western release coming later this Autumn. I recently played an early stage of the game on both Wii U and 3DS.
I felt some influences from some of Yuji Naka’s previous games while playing. The homing attack feels like it did in Sonic. The green natural world and flying around, speeding through objects felt a lot like Nights. But despite these Sega influences, the greatest sense of familiarity came from my experiences with Gravity Rush—only you’re actually flying through the air, not changing your centre of gravity.
Not all action takes place in the sky, though. Levels have a mixture of sky battles and land battles. In the level I played, the land battles had smaller enemies that I could use the homing attack to quickly take them out and switch targets. There is also some effort put into providing replayability with the ability to replay levels to collect everything and improve your score.
Update: It appears we made a mistake in describing how the controls work in the the two versions of Rodea. After speaking with NIS America, we understand that the 3DS version is controlled via the Circle Pad and Shoulder buttons, while the Wii U version is controlled with the Left and Right Sticks as well as the Shoulder buttons.
As a result, we’ve removed the original paragraph describing how the controls work to avoid any confusion. We’ll have updated impressions of Rodea closer to release, but in the meantime we apologize for the error.
