In SkyDodge, you take control of a plane that must fly and dodge obstacles in order to stay alive. The longer you stay alive, the higher your score will be. The game looks like it could be fun, but its overly simple gameplay makes for a rather boring experience.

The only aspect of the game you have to control is the movement of the plane. You can tilt left, right, forward or backward to move the plan around the screen. These controls do work, but seem a bit sluggish. While flying, you have to dodge rocks of varying sizes. If you hit a small rock, only minor damage will be done, while larger rocks will cause much more damage. It seems to me like you’re flying pretty close to the water, over beautiful little islands. So, it’s a bit confusing as to why there are a ton of flying rocks to avoid.

There are other items to either avoid or collect in the game. There are coins, health points and protective shields that will increase your score as you fly along. There are also some objects that won’t cause damage, but instead, make your flying more difficult. If you hit a kite, your controls will be reversed, so tilting to the left will make you fly right. Hitting a bird will cause a giant feather cloud to block your vision for a few seconds. If you hit a rocket, you’d think you would blow up, right? Nope. When you crash into a speeding rocket, a parachute deploys to slow your controls down, making it very difficult to avoid obstacles. This one just doesn’t make sense.

As you progress through the game and increase your score, you will periodically level up. Each new level up increases the amount of obstacles on screen and makes them travel faster through the sky. This will obviously make dodging the rocks much more difficult.

When your plane is destroyed, your final score is submitted to the OpenFeint leader boards. Here, you can view your score compared to others and check out which achievements you’ve accomplished.

The graphics are actually quite nice in this game. The scenery is rendered beautifully in the background. However, I wish there was more than one location to fly around in. Sound effects and music are definitely an issue. The music is actually nice, but really doesn’t fit the theme of the game. It’s a relaxed guitar riff that loops, but has no place in an intense flying game where you are trying to dodge giant boulders. Also, the sound effects could use some work. Hitting a rock sounds more like a funny noise rather than a damage sound effect. The audio really doesn’t pull you into the game at all.

SkyDodge does have some good potential to be a fun game. Controls need to be adjusted, music and sound need to be enhanced and more content needs to be added. If these things are taken care of in future updates, then we could have an entertaining game here. However, as it stands now, I cannot recommend this title. It’s just not a fun experience.