In Sky Kingdoms, you find that a dragon has stolen a special magical crystal and that it’s up to you, the mighty hero, to traverse the countryside, heroically shooting little colored balls at other little colored balls to reclaim the magic crystal and save the island kingdoms. Sky Kingdoms is an arcade game, and I’m more than happy to work my way through the levels just for their own sakes, but it’s nice that the developers at least tried to tie the levels together with a little background story. I don’t think it was necessarily needed, but it is a little something extra.

If you’ve ever played games such as Luxor or Zuma, you have an idea of what’s involved with Sky Kingdoms. You have a line of colored balls, snaking its way across the screen toward some kind of exit point of doom (in this case, a well). You use your little ball shooter at the bottom of the screen to shoot colored balls into the oncoming menace. You need to match at least three of the same color so that the contiguous color group disappears. Get rid of all the balls before the end of the level and you win the level. The premise is the same, but the details are what makes Sky Kingdoms different.

There are a number of special ball types that will show up randomly mixed with the others that give you bonuses. The little grey ball is just a coin ball. Shoot it with any color ball and a little coin drops. You’ll want to catch up, because you’re going to use coins to buy upgrades between levels. You have to unlock the other bonus balls. You’ll see a special glowing version of one of the normal colored balls. Make a set with it and it turns into one of the special bonus balls. You definitely want these bonus balls. Rollback makes the whole lines of balls move backwards — which is terribly handy if you’re about to lose the level. Stop actually stops the movement of all of the incoming balls for a time — though you can still shoot away. Ball of destruction is neat; it destroys a random number of balls of the color of the destruction ball. Fireball destroys everything in a radius around it. Freezeball turns a line of adjacent balls to ice that will all shatter with a single shot. Lightning randomly destroys some quantity of balls anywhere on the screen. Crosshair gives you an aiming line and enables you to shoot faster. Finally, paintball turns all of the nearby balls the same color.

Normally you just collect falling coins/crystals/gold/whatever just for additional points. In Sky Kingdoms, you get to use the coins to upgrade any of the bonus balls or buy extra lives (you start with five). There are three levels of upgrade for each of the special balls, and they are definitely worth having. Your special abilities will last longer or the destruction power is increased — such as more lightning strikes or a bigger radius of destruction for the fireball attack.

In addition to the regular bonus balls, there are three extra bonuses you can earn on each level that aren’t transferred to the next level. There’s a little block that puts up a barrier in the ball path for a short time, there’s a fireball that comes roaring out of the exit point and destroys a bunch of balls up the line (until it runs into one of the bonus balls), and there’s a swirly little dude that sorts all of the balls on the screen by color. I love that little swirly ball. For the most part, you don’t start with any of these goodies. You have to destroy incoming balls as quickly as possible and when you’ve destroyed enough, you get one (or more) of these bonuses. Feel free to use them early and often, because as I said, you can’t take them with you.

As you destroy things and make nifty combo shots (where destroying one group causes another group to form and blow up too), you get coins and crystals dropping. The crystals all add to your score, but I started ignoring the crystals and just going for the coins. The score didn’t really matter to me but buying upgrades is a nice tangible bonus while you’re playing.

You’ll find there are five kinds of levels in Sky Kingdoms. There’s the standard level with one winding path of balls to kill. There are some levels in which you’ll have two paths that twine around each other and two lines of balls to keep track of (luckily these balls move slower). The combo levels encourage you to try to destroy the lines of balls with one well-aimed shot that will trigger cascading combo destruction. I loved the chain reaction levels. These have lots and lots of the bonus balls ready to use. Trigger a fireball or lightning ball and just watch the show as the screen goes nuts with destruction. The last level of each chapter (there are 12) is the snake level. You need to destroy all of his balls as normal, but the snake balls attack back. Every few seconds one of the balls goes all glowy and disappears from the snake as it launches an attack at you. Each color has a different attack pattern — from beam of light to multiple seeking balls of light. Don’t let them touch you. You don’t lose a life on the snake level, but you don’t get to keep any of the coins you earn either.

The music was nice enough, but the real pleasure comes from the special effects in Sky Kingdoms. Each bonus ball has a distinct sound effect, and the lightning storm effect on the chain reaction level is just spectacular. The crosshairs bonus sounds like a firearm being cocked, for example, and the paintball makes a very satisfying splat noise.

I did feel like the game was a little short with only 90 levels. I was able to play through the whole thing in just a few hours. Yes, you can easily play again, but still. There are 36 different backgrounds that you’ll play against, so they’re a bit repetitive, but not as bad as some games. They’re definitely interesting backgrounds in any case. As you finish each of the 12 sections, you also unlock wallpaper that you can use on your computer. They were nice enough little fantasy scenes. There are three modes of play — easy, normal and hard. The main difference seemed to be in the frequency of the bonus balls. I felt like I had a ton of bonus balls on every level in easy mode, but I was able to easily complete the game in normal mode.

I did have a few minor annoyances. The initial instructions don’t tell the newcomer to the genre that you can right-click to toggle between your current ball and the next ball if you need that other color. In the beginning levels, the tutorial comments would pop up after I started playing the level, causing me to sometimes click before I got a chance to read them or making me shoot my little ball into the wrong spot. This is especially bad on the snake level since you need to know about the snake biting back if you’re going to succeed at this level. I also had the game shut down on me with no notice about three times. I cannot say for sure if this is a game issue or because my computer has been a little flaky lately. Happily, the game did remember where I left off, and I did not lose any progress other than the level I was currently on.

Overall, I enjoyed my time playing Sky Kingdoms. Sometimes it’s nice to play an arcade game that doesn’t require a ton of thought. You just shoot the balls and make combinations. Yes, you can do some strategy going for those combinations, but you don’t have to worry about them if you don’t want to. The special features make Sky Kingdoms a nice addition to your ball shooting arcade game library. It’s fun and addictive, and I’ll definitely be playing it again.