Gotta Fly! for Windows

A free game about Porco Rosso’s flying

Gotta Fly! is a free adventure video game wherein you must evade enemy planes to survive. Developed by GoonbarGames, this 2D pixelated indie game is inspired by the classic Studio Ghibli film, Porco Rosso, and has you manning the titular character’s iconic red seaplane.

Similar to Holey Hell and Pink River, Gotta Fly! features endless gameplay and simply measures how far you can go without dying. However, it doesn’t have much else to it—no achievements at all—so it can get boring pretty quickly. It doesn’t even register your highest score like most games.

Escape by flying

Porco Rosso is a 1992 Japanese animated adventure comedy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and animated by the world-famous Studio Ghibli. The movie’s plot revolves around the misadventures of an Italian World War I ex-fighter ace who is now living as a freelance bounty hunter chasing "air pirates" in the Adriatic Sea. He’s nicknamed “Porco Rosso” due to his strange anthropomorphic pig appearance, but his piloting skills are unmatched.

In Gotta Fly!, you get to play as Porco himself and fly his plane as the map slowly scrolls to the side. Using your WASD keys, you must dart around the incoming enemy planes in order to avoid collisions. You only have three lives, which you can see on the bottom-left corner of the screen. Fortunately, you’re free to move anywhere—even on the water—so it’s easy enough to survive.

However, the main issue with this game is that there’s no real achievement to lasting as long as possible. The counter at the bottom-right doesn’t get saved as your high score when you lose. You don’t unlock anything either. The difficulty doesn’t even scale as time goes on. Plus, there’s no in-game tutorial for the controls. It would be nice to have more content since the film has numerous flight scenes.

Needs a lot of engaging content

All in all, Gotta Fly! is a nice little fan game for an iconic animated movie but it falls short of having enough interesting content to keep players engaged. The controls and gameplay are simple but you won’t feel like playing for long since the game doesn’t exactly reward you for your efforts. It needs more features that the film can easily inspire.