Developer: Aerial_Knight
Publisher: Aerial_Knight
Year: 2026
Genre: FPS
System: Windows

Aerial_Knight’s DropShot is the newest game by Neil Jones, who goes by the handle of Aerial_Knight for his game dev work. It’s a first-person game where you fall through the sky, shooting bad guys and avoiding obstacles. Honestly, the intro screen describes the plot better than I ever could…

It’s fantastic stuff. I love when games give you a wild premise on one screen and then immediately doing fun video game stuff after that. It reminds me a little of Death Ray Manta where the plot is simply “Death Ray Manta has lasers in his head. He blew up his house, now he lives in space instead.” and then you go shoot stuff in space.

The game reminds me a lot of AaAaAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. You fall through levels and get the highest grade score you can, by shooting enemies with your finger gun and collecting coins. You have a limited number of shots each level but can get more by picking up powerups. There’s also pickups you can get that give you other temporary weapons, but my understanding is that this has since been reworked in a patch so this post is already out of date as I write it.

The game technically only takes 2-2.5 hours to “beat.” But so much of the game is built around you rerunning levels and trying to beat your previous score that it feels silly saying that my initial run of mostly lower letter grades for completing levels is it, I’m going to go back and replay them to beat my scores as people frequently do in arcade games. There’s 50 levels and while most of the game follows the formula of you falling and shooting other enemies until you reach the end of the level, there’s the occasional boss battle or race level, where you try to catch a falling dragon egg before your opponent. If I had any real criticisms of the design, I suppose I wish it had a little more variety in the level design in the middle but the game moves so fast that I really can’t complain.

My only other real criticism is that the game could have used more polish, bug fixes, and felt better navigating menus with mouse and keyboard but again, it has probably been improved by the time you read this and while the game does say it’s meant to be played with a controller, I think it controlled very well with a mouse and keyboard. I just do not enjoy playing FPS with a controller so I remained stubborn and played with the keyboard and I thought that it felt great whipping around shooting guys with your finger gun while falling from the sky. Any gripes I have mentioned in this post are minor, I think the core of the game is very solid and I had a great time. Something I really appreciate about his games is that they all have an art style that is unique to him and looks gorgeous. The two screenshots I have in here don’t really do justice to how great the game looks in motion. I think it’s Aerial_Knight best game yet and I’m hoping it’s a big hit because I would also love to see it get a sequel, much like how his previous game Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield led to Aerial_Knight’s We Never Yield, which I feel got overlooked but does some really interesting stuff with the runner game.

If you had trouble parsing all those rambling thoughts, I think it’s a lovely game and tribute to Neil’s friend Daniel Wilkins, who created the music for Never Yield and We Never Yield. I can’t recommend it enough and I’m excited to see what Aerial_Knight creates next.

Aerial_Knight’s DropShot is available on Steam, Epic Games Store, Playstation, Xbox, and Google Play.