Chuhai Labs' Wild Blue Skies arrived on August 13 with no midnight countdown, no pre-order tiers and a $14.99 price tag, which is roughly what a good on-rails shooter should cost and almost nothing like what the genre's most famous entry sells for today. It is out now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with a Nintendo Switch version penciled in for the autumn.
The pitch is unambiguous: this is a spiritual successor to Star Fox 64, made in part by people who were in the room when the original happened. Chuhai Labs is co-developing with VITEI BACKROOM, and Giles Goddard - one of the lead programmers on the SNES original - is among the names attached. Balor Games is publishing. That lineage explains almost everything about how the game looks and moves.
Bowie Stray and the Blue Bombers
You fly as Bowie Stray, wingleader of the Blue Bombers, against the forces of a warlord named Grimclaw. The structure will feel immediately familiar to anyone who spent 1997 memorizing Corneria: corridor-shaped levels, a squadron of AI wingmates who chatter at you and occasionally need saving, branching route splits that decide which stages you see, and a score counter in the corner that turns every run into a reason to go again. There are all-range dogfight arenas too, so it is not purely a shooting gallery.
The art style is doing a lot of work
Where Wild Blue Skies separates itself from the nostalgia it is chasing is in presentation. Instead of aping N64 polygons, Chuhai Labs went for a bright, chunky, hand-painted look - flat-shaded cliffs, saturated blues, anime-styled anthropomorphic pilots delivered in fully voiced cutscene panels. It reads as a cartoon from a Saturday morning that never existed rather than a museum piece, and it keeps the screen legible when a dozen enemy craft and their tracer fire fill the frame at once.
Reviews are split, and predictably so
The critical response landed all over the map on launch day. The positive reviews argue this is the closest anyone has come to a genuine Star Fox 64 follow-up in nearly thirty years, praising the handling, the score-chasing loop and the branching path structure that rewards replay. The colder reviews make almost the same observation and treat it as the problem: that it tracks the 1997 template so faithfully - beat for beat, in places - that it rarely proposes an idea of its own. Runtime is short, in keeping with the genre and the price.
Both readings can be true at once. Fifteen dollars for a compact, replayable arcade shooter built by people with a direct line to the original is an easy recommendation for anyone who has been waiting for exactly this. Players hoping for a reinvention of the on-rails shooter should temper that.
Where to get it
Wild Blue Skies is available now on Steam and Steam Deck, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S for $14.99. A demo is also on Steam if you want to sample a stage before committing. The Nintendo Switch version is targeted for autumn 2026, which is a slightly funny place for this particular game to end up last.
