Inspired by the extreme sport of base jumping, Skydive: Proximity Flight is a downloadable extreme sports game that uses gamepad or motion controller technology to put you inside the wingsuit for exhilarating skydiving experiences. Learn mid-air tricks that only professional skydivers can do, or make up your own tricks alone or with friends. Gaijin Entertainment collaborated with three legendary base jumping athletes, Jokke Sommer, Andrey Boldyrev and Halvor Angvik to ensure real life base jump experiences of speed and manoeuvrability were correctly conveyed and incorporated into the game play...

When I heard this game was being released I was really looking forward to playing it. One of the reasons I was a tad disappointed with Saints Row IV is that they'd taken away the parachuting ability that was such a fun part of the previous game in the franchise Saints Row the Third. And, equally, one of the interesting parts of the campaign mode of Call of Duty: Black Ops II is the short segment where you can fly down the terrain in a squirrel suit.

Skydive: Proximity Flight is proof that you can have too much of a good thing. It didn't take me long to realise that this isn't the sort of game you can actually play for much longer than a couple of hours without getting bored.

It ticks all the right boxes: the graphics are great, it's fast and furious, and it's challenging... It's just that there's not enough variety here to really get you fuelled up.

There are three main modes. First up is Challenges where you have to fly through a set amount of rings before unlocking the next challenge. Then there's the Adrenaline Race mode where you compete against three other computer controlled skydivers to get to the end goal first. The last mode is Freestyle, where you can chose any of the main maps and different starting points and do whatever you want - there are no goals, simply rack up as many points as possible.

Points are achieved by flying through the designated rings (in Challenge mode only) and performing tricks (by holding the X button and then one of the four directional buttons to perform a roll).

In the Adrenaline Race there are only actually four different races to compete in, so once you've completed them there's little incentive to go back. I earned three stars on all four races fairly quickly, but you can check the worldwide, as well as your friends, leaderboards to see how you measure up.

The last segment of the game allows you to see your Friends' Challenges so you can see if they are beating you.

The fact that you can use the Playstation's motion controller technology is a major plus point, but the novelty is short lived and you'll be back to using the standard controls pretty quickly.

It's a decent enough game, especially if you know a lot of friends who are playing it - because that's the only way I can think that I'd want to revisit this on a regular basis; to see if I could been my friends' challenges. By far my biggest complaint is that you don't get much for your £18.

While everything is great and you can't fault the developers attention to detail, at the end of the day flying around in a squirrel suit is not quite as much fun as you'd think.

6

Nick Smithson