Stunt Flyer – PS5 Review

Stunt Flyer is, as you might expect, a flying game and it comes to us from Australian studio Torus Games who, when they’re not pumping out licensed kids’ games like PAW Patrol and Ben 10, were responsible for the reasonably decent World War Z.  But this game sees them not only going back to their family-friendly roots but also dipping into their own softography as it’s a remake of their 2011 Wii game Stunt Flyer: Hero of the Skies.  A game that few will have played, or even heard of.

There’s no story here.  The official blurb just refers to it being a “vibrant flying adventure” led by the brother and sister team of Jimmy and Sophie.  But essentially this is a pretty stripped back experience where you’re just given a place to fly and a list of missions and in-game achievements to try to earn.  But that’s okay because this isn’t a game that really needs a story.

You start off in the air and that’s pretty much where you’ll stay for the whole game (aside from when you return to the airstrip to make any changes to your set up).  The game is set across three islands, each with a list of missions to complete.  These are pretty much just limited to racing through checkpoints, trying to keep up with moving things (a bus, a minecart, a drone – that sort of thing), photographing landmarks or watering plants.  The lists are long but they tend to repeat their objectives in one way or another.

Accessing these missions can be done by either flying through a mission marker or accessing them from the Options button menu which is where you’ll find the in-game achievements list too.  This does give the game a sense of freedom as you can generally do the missions in whatever order you want or you can just fly around grabbing the collectibles.

But, if we’re being brutally honest, initially we thought this game was absolute rubbish.  The flying is slow and very simple, the visuals are dated with plenty of janky pixels that could, and should, have been anti-aliased and the gameplay felt like a dated version of Pilotwings and not even the ace SNES version but rather the N64 one which never seemed as good.  Some of those missions needed finessing too.  For example, the ones where you photograph landmarks are a bit broken as you just need to be near the landmark to take a snap, even if there’s a wall between you and it.  While some of the other missions are just mind-numbingly dull (especially the ones where you water plants).

And so, after one session with the game, we had it written off as yet another indie dud.  More shovelware for the PSN store.  But we were a little hasty.  Sure, it is slow, it is repetitive and it’s one of those throwback titles where if it had come out on the PS2, it wouldn’t have made much of an impact there, let alone on a PS5 in 2025.  But, we sort of enjoyed finding the collectibles – the game does a smart thing of highlighting the final 10% of them when you’ve found the rest – and getting gold medals on the missions is actually a lot harder than you’d initially imagine.  And so we warmed up to it all a bit.  Sure, it’s not exactly the barnstorming arcade flyer we were hoping for but it’s an alright game to relax with while listening to a podcast.  Which you’ll want to do as the game is full of buggy, unmastered sound effects.  Also, we weren’t getting any music from it despite there apparently being music on the Switch version.

There are annoyances though.  The original game came out in 2011 but they could have updated some of the UI.  As you level up, you’ll earn new planes and these are a fun-looking mix of modern fighter jets, ancient WW1 and WW2 biplanes and a few weird ones too, but they don’t show any stats for speed or handling and there are missions where you absolutely need the right plane or you won’t be able to complete them.  So a bit of extra information would have been nice.  Also, the game doesn’t really explain how to unlock them and it’s not exactly clear what your mission goals are.  It talks about your ‘next target’ in terms of score/time taken but there’s actually a gold/silver/bronze ranking system in play that’s not initially clear.

Also, when you restart the game you’ll find that all your collectibles will have been reset.  So if you want the trophies for getting them all, you’ll need to do them in one go.  For some odd reason.

Visually, while the game is a bit dated and unimpressive, the three islands on offer are reasonably interesting.  The first is a standard island, very much in the Pilotwings 64 mode.  The second island is based around a large volcano and looks a bit more dramatic.  The last is a strange island in the sky that you can fly underneath.  And there’s at least a good amount of colour on the screen to keep things bright and cheery.  But don’t expect much from the textures and models on offer as it does all look very simplistic.

The way to get the most out of the game is to try to get gold medals on all of the missions.  This actually requires some skill and offers up a bit of challenge that the game seemed to initially lack.  Or you can just fly around looking for the collectibles.  Either way, you should get a few days of moderate fun out of Stunt Flyer.  Just don’t expect much in the way of excitement.