Flight is one of the greatest aspirations of humanity, and it’s from the hallmarks of scientific advancement in flight that several modern conveniences of today stem from, like the airfreight of your packages when you suddenly remember someone’s birthday is two days away. Stunt Flyer is a game that channels Pilotwings or the flight game from Wii Sports Resort, where you’ll soar the skies and complete all kinds of different mission objectives.
Plot Ahoy!
There really isn’t much story in Stunt Flyer. You have multiple islands that are decorated with a bunch of little challenges you can do, and each time you complete one you’ll improve your pilot rank. There are floating rings to fly through (which give trauma to anyone who has played Superman 64), treasure boxes that you can shoot to reveal trophies, etc., but after a short tutorial you’re mostly at your leisure to fly around and do whatever missions you want in whatever order you want to complete them.
Review Notes
Stunt Flyer is a fairly simplistic, extremely kid-friendly flight sim where you can fly around multiple islands with your choice of pilot and plane. You can adjust your speed, fire a water cannon that you refill by flying close to the ocean’s surface, and can take photographs too. Each island has a variety of missions you can do, and you can compete for the best times in them with friends too, since this supports local multiplayer.
You’ll have the availability to play time trials, shooting missions that could involve shooting targets or even watering crops, taking pictures, or taking part in races. Missions are particularly easy to find since you have a top-down map you can view, plus incomplete missions have a light beam that helps guide you to their location as well. Your controls are quite simple in Stunt Flyer as you can do a quick U-turn like in Star Fox 64’s all-range mode and do barrel rolls, depending on necessity. You’ll likely wind up using the U-turn a lot during shooting missions, as it’s a lot more time consuming to fly out and then manually turn around.
There are a decent number of unlockable pilots, planes, and liveries for those planes. You start with Jimmy Jetstream and his red and yellow aircraft, but like how there is no rule that a dog can’t play basketball, there’s no rule you can’t fly a rainbow-colored hang glider either. As you rank up, you’ll unlock more paint jobs for your planes, which gives you something to look forward to while flying around the island.
When it comes to visuals, Stunt Flyer looks like an improved Wii game, which would be in large part due to the fact that this title is actually the remastered Kid Adventures: Sky Captain, which released in 2010. The music is also nothing to write home about, though it is largely inoffensive.
TLDR
When it comes down to it, Stunt Flyer is a decent little arcade-style flight sim for children. While I didn’t find a lot to keep me, personally, invested in playing and replaying every single challenge to get the best score or time possible, Stunt Flyer would make a good entry point for a kid who is interested in playing flying games because it has low stakes and simple controls since this was originally a Wii game from over a decade and a half ago.
In the end, Stunt Flyer has a good amount of content to keep kids busy for a while, but if you’re looking for a story or more involved control schemes, you’ll have to check out other flight sim-based titles that offer a little bit more content, something like Ace Combat or Project Sylpheed.
Developers: Torus Games
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 4, Xbox One