Hmm, I really want to like this, but it had some pretty rough edges to it!
For the most part, this is a pretty nice Christmas-themed Paperboy-esque arcade game: it's fun to balance the tricky flight controls with throwing the presents accurately and go for a high score. I also thought it was a nice touch that you need to 'prove yourself' on the title screen to unlock higher difficulties. General presentation and is pretty nice and juicy and such, so it should've been an easy lay-up!
However, there were aspects of the way the game is designed and constructed that brought down the experience for me:
*I found it kind of odd that there was no sort of bonus for speedy deliveries or some sort of time limit to make all the deliveries. Because of this, I found it all too easy to lame it out, moving very slowly and taking easy shots, when it would've been way more fun, challenging and chaotic if you needed to take risks. You'd think that he would be pressured to get it all done quickly before the night ends: it's Santa's whole schtick after all! Was hoping that maybe this would be the case in higher difficulties, but no, those just decrease your present allotment.
*I found the whole handling of failing a level very awkward: instead of a more common solution of living with your failure and moving onto the next level, or allowing you to retry from scratch, it instead forcibly decreases your difficulty level and lets you play the level again with whatever deliveries and damages you've made still there.
*I found the noise aspect a bit disappointing that all it does is blare noises and give you a point penalty: would've loved if cops start descending on you and try to blast you outta the sky, or maybe kids/paparazzi try to take pictures of you and you need to dodge as that seems like a more natural consequence fit.
*The most frustrating issue that I had with the game was how presents would be randomly dropped without my input. I'm not even talking about presents being dropped when you bump into stuff: that's ok and kind of funny. No, I had plenty of times where presents would, for example, drop in pairs when I just tried to drop one, or just drop completely out of nowhere, despite me being very deliberate and precise with my inputs.
It's still a nice arcade game with a solid core, but the execution was a bit off for me.
