The core concept of Aerial Knight’s Dropshot is utterly bonkers. You and your opponents leap from a plane, circling hundreds of miles above the ground. None of you have parachutes though, and instead you willingly freefall to your doom. As you plummet, you must shoot your fellow plummeters with your magic finger gun – yes, really. Your objective is to kill them all before you hit the ground. Oh, and your player character is called Smoke Wallace. He has purple skin and magical powers because he was bitten by the same radioactive dragon that ate all of his family. You see? Bonkers.

Bright and garish, the visuals are all acid-soaked kaleidoscopic weirdness. It’s not my kind of thing, but this game certainly has a striking and attention-grabbing look. Gameplay is structured around small levels that last for sixty seconds, Dropshot is gaming for the TikTok generation. Each level is intended as a dopamine hit but to be quickly forgotten. As you fall from a first-person perspective, you’ll need to dodge floating islands, laser traps and your opponents’ return fire to stay alive, and with only two lives, this can be challenging. Kill efficiently and stylishly and you’ll rack up points and a high grade, the idea being to return to each level numerous times to hit a high score and achieve a perfect run. The problem is, that despite the bonkers premise and over the top visuals, the gameplay itself is rather pedestrian, leaving me with little interest in returning to a level once it was done.

The biggest issue is speed; there’s little sense of any. As you hurtle through the sky, it should be an adrenaline rush, like knee-sliding in Platinum Games’ Vanquish, or hurtling round a tight corner far too fast in F-Zero. Instead, it’s more akin to strolling to the shops to buy some bread. This is an oddly muted experience, rather than dodging floating islands and traps by the skin of your teeth, you seem to have a veritable age to gently steer yourself out of the way.

Achieving a high score amounts to little more than the eye-straining task of having to spot your tiny freefalling opponents in the distance, slowly line up a shot, and take them out. You’ll likely fail to spot them all on the first attempt, forcing you to attempt the level numerous times to catch them. Often your foes will kill you first, but you’ll have little idea that a bullet is coming. One moment you’re alive, the next you’re dead, with little to no visual clues that an attack is incoming. Worse, the collision detection isn’t great – possibly due to the challenges of basing the game around a first-person view – meaning sometimes you die, sometimes you survive, and you’re really not sure why.

There are two other game modes. The first is a boss battle that sees you fighting an enormous dragon, a nasty fella who can absorb a whole lot of damage, forcing you to conserve your ammo and keep a look out for ammunition drops to fall through. This is certainly more enjoyable than the main game. Primarily because it resolves the issue of the irritating unseen enemy attacks, as the dragon blasts you with big obvious fireballs that must be quickly shot from the sky, bringing some old-school light gun game shenanigans to proceedings.

The final mode is a straight up race between you and your rival to catch a golden egg before you hit the ground. This does, finally, get the pulse racing, as due to numerous speed boosters things end up fast and frantic. Darting through arrays of laser beams, narrowly avoiding chunks of rock, finally I can see what the development team were going for. If these thrills and spills could be replicated throughout the rest of the game, then Aerial Knight’s Dropshot would be an absolute indie banger. As it is, there’s just too many of the boring levels getting in the way of the good stuff.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a nostalgia-soaked love letter to nine-year-old you. A side-scrolling beat ‘em up that looks like it just stepped out of a 90’s arcade, Cosmic Invasion features the character design of Marvel’s comic heyday, pixel-art visuals that ape Capcom’s Super Hero fighting series, and a tag team mechanic that is pure X-Men vs. Street Fighter. In short, with this much 90’s nostalgia powering it, how can Marvel Cosmic Invasion possibly fail?

Marvel big bad Annihilus wants to take over the universe and it’s up to you and three friends – either online or local in very slick drop-in drop-out multiplayer – to stop him. The story is suitably silly and slight. The, thankfully skippable, static cutscenes bracketing each level are completely incomprehensible scrolling beat ‘em up hokum, but the opening animated intro and accompanying theme-song is an unadulterated delight, perfectly capturing the essence of the iconic X-Men cartoon. You’ll be listening to it on repeat on your chosen music streaming platform of choice, let me tell you.

With an impressive character roster of 15 heroes, Cosmic Invasion certainly offers a stacked cast of Marvel do-gooders. There’s the expected A-listers like Spider-Man, Wolverine and Iron Man, but also a few more niche picks, such as Beta-Ray Bill, Cosmic Ghost Rider, and Phyla-Vell. Whilst I would have personally liked developer Tribute Games to delve a little deeper in the weeds of the Marvel character back catalogue – Marvel Rivals did this  with Jeff the Land Shark, turning the diminutive hero into a fan favourite and star of numerous comics in the process – the overall depth and breadth of the line-up really can’t be faulted.

What can be faulted is the variance in how much fun the characters are to play as. Flying characters suffer the most, the cost of being able to hover around the place a bit is seemingly being lumbered with a vastly reduced move-set. Storm is a total snore-fest, with only a handful of attacks on offer, whilst Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Phoenix and Phyla-Vell struggled to get much play time, simply because they can’t do very much. A couple of basic attacks, a range attack and a special? It’s not much terribly exciting. Plus, the insistence on flying heroes and enemies is unnecessarily fiddly, it’s often difficult to tell where you and your enemy are, resulting in a lot of accidental punching of thin air.

Wolverine and Black Panther are both superb, however, with varied combos and juggles putting their flying counterparts to shame. She Hulk’s range of pro-wrestling themed moves are brilliant fun to unleash, and Venom and Spider-Man deliver all the web-based antics a fan could hope for. The impressive sounding 15 character roster is quickly reduced down to five heroes you’ll actually want to play as, with the rest acting in a support role, leaping into the action with a brief bonus attack at the touch of a button.

If the heroes are well catered for, the villains they’ll be punching are not. Considering the vast universe of characters Tribute Games could call upon to include, they picked some lame ducks here. Most of the time you’ll be beating-up the exact same bug-like minions, only they’ll be painted in slightly different colours from level to level. Sure, there’s a few Sentinels to take on and some symbiotes, but mostly you’ll spend your time battling big mutated bees. Where’s the Kree? The Skrulls? The Chitauri? For a game set in the galaxy-spanning Marvel Cosmic comics, the lack of decent bad guys to duff up feels like the waste of an iconic licence.

Boss fights are also quite boring, even if they do feature a decent range of Marvel villains. No matter if you’re facing Knull, The Phoenix, or MODOK, your enemy will launch the same limited range of attacks and will soon be defeated without much effort. Indeed, for a game aping a 90’s coin-up, Marvel Cosmic Invasion is unexpectedly easy, offering little challenge and only occasionally pushing back against the player. My partner and I only had one or two re-starts and saw off the entire game in a couple of hours. We had little use for the tag-team mechanic either. Sure, you can swap in and out characters to deliver a massive juggling combo – so long as you don’t pick a flyer as a partner – buy why bother when a few punches will kill most opponents?

Worse, the levels themselves are oddly dull and repetitive. Scrolling beat ‘em ups are hardly known for their variety when it comes to level design, but Streets of Rage 4, Absolum, and Tribute Games own Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge prove it can be done. With no weapon pick-ups, no vehicles to drive or mounts to ride, no new moves to unlock, and the aforementioned limited range of enemies, Marvel Cosmic Invasion, even with its short run time, ultimately becomes a bit of a slog.

Despite all of the over-the-top visuals with nostalgia dripping loveliness then, playing Marvel Cosmic Invasion is just a bit, well, boring.