You know that moment in gaming where you’re no longer making conscious decisions and instead find yourself relying on pure, razor fast instinct? This is how I felt for almost the entirety of the time I spent with SkyDrift. Much like the fantastic Split/Second, SkyDrift‘s brand of racing puts you on the verge of death constantly, and everytime you manage to narrowly escape certain doom at the hands of the track’s terrain or your opponent’s weapons it feels like a miracle.

It’s amazing how much the concept of flight changes how a racing game plays. The added verticality of racing in an airplane instead of a car allows for a sense of freedom that really makes every race play out differently. This is also helped by some really superb track design. There aren’t a ton of tracks, but the ones that are there are filled to the brim with branching pathways, a ton of variety, and plenty of extra dangerous obstacles that reward players willing to take risks.

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How many airplane racing games can you think of off the top of your head? Any? Without resorting to Google, all I could come up with was one third of Diddy Kong Racing. This is exactly why I was instantly fascinated by Digital Reality’s SkyDrift. It’s in a sub-genre that’s rarely explored.

You could call it “Mario Kart in the sky”, but that really isn’t fair to the game. SkyDrift may be a weapons-based racer, but it’s far more deliberate and skill-based than any racing I’ve ever done in the Mushroom Kingdom. The fact that you need a second analogue stick to control your plane’s knife position is proof enough that the game is deeper than some of its contemporaries.

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As a fan of the genre, I’ve seen my fair share of modern scrolling shooters or “shmups” as they’re often called. Yet, after the magnificent Gradius V back in 2004, I haven’t seen very many that actually look modern. Even some from this year tend to look like something you might’ve seen in the arcade as much as a decade ago.

That’s the first of many ways in which Sine Mora sets itself apart. The game is gorgeous. There’s a real sense of depth to the environments that manage to strike an effective balance of being attractive without being distracting. Colors are often vibrant, environments are varied, and giant bosses are real spectacles to behold thanks to art direction from Grasshopper.

And yet, as great as the visuals were, it was the unique mechanics developer Digital Reality put into the game that kept me coming back for another try. Sine Mora is not about one hit kills or traditional health systems. Sine Mora is about time (in more ways than one). While you’re playing, the clock always counts down. Killing enemies will send the clock backward a bit, while getting hit drastically reduces your time. When the clock strikes “00″, you die.

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