Shaq has more video games featuring him than any former NBA player/actor/police officer/huge dude should rightly have. Or maybe there aren’t enough games featuring Shaq? Yeah, I think that’s it. We need more Shaq games dang it, and it looks like we’re in luck.
Following the success of Shaqdown (Free), which was itself a pretty terrible game but still more fun than watching Kazaam, developer One Spear is back with some more Shaq in a new mobile title that blends the fun of skydiving with slam dunking. Yes, the premise is that a new extreme sport tasks you with jumping from high up in the sky, collecting coins and sailing through rings to earn points on your way to the grand finale of slamming a basketball through a hoop placed on the ground below. As you can see in the trailer for Shaq Sky Slam, dunking from such great heights can have some amazing effects like mashing the Statue of Liberty halfway into the ground.
I’m not sure about you, but if you could pre-order games on the App Store I would have done so about 10 seconds into that trailer. Heck, I probably would have pre-ordered based on the title alone. Besides using Shaq as your skydiving dunker, you can use famed Australian stunt biker Robbie Maddison, a gymnast(?) character named Mei, or… The Devil. Shaq Sky Slam sounds so incredibly insane I almost can’t believe it’s real, but it is. It is very real.
Despite Shaqdown being not a great video game, it was still entertaining, at least to me. Shaq Sky Slam at least looks more mechanically solid as an actual video game compared to Shaqdown, and these skydiving games have turned out pretty well on iOS in the past. I have high hopes. I’m also fully prepared to have those hopes dashed and enjoy the game anyway. Did I mention you play as Shaq skydiving from a plane and then dunking a basketball through a rim attached to the Statue of Liberty which then causes said statue to end up chest-deep in the ground? Because there’s that. Look for Shaq Sky Slam at the end of October.
