I've had a theory of sorts bouncing around my head that ended up relevant to my experience of Sky Rogue by Fractal Phase. It goes like this: advancing in a video game requires some mix of luck, technique, and strategy. Luck is straightforward; if the game has randomization of any kind, getting favorable RNG results can make progress easier to attain. Technique means your moment-to-moment actions--the nuts and bolts of what button you're pressing when, your reflexes and timing, etc. Strategy is cerebral high-level decision-making: planning ahead, prioritizing objectives, figuring out the solutions to puzzles*, and other game-related thought that takes place when under minimal time pressure. When I played Sky Rogue, a flukey bit of progress from luck led me to believe that what I needed was to hone my technique, but it turned out that what was holding me back was actually my strategy.
A run of SR consists of up to 13 "days", each of them a randomized mission to destroy one or more targets and return safely to base. Anything you blow up during the mission earns you funds that you can use to upgrade your jet or its weapons in between days. You can also choose a different aircraft model and/or rearrange its weapons, between days or by visiting base midmission. If you get shot down or crash, that's game over--you might unlock more loadout options, but you're back to Day 1 with unupgraded equipment for the next run.
You can try to get really good at timing your barrel rolls... or you can load up on flares and take some of the work off your back.
The first few days are pretty tame. You're opposed by "drones" with weak weaponry and little evasive capability, and your targets' defenses are thinly spread. But by day 5 or so, the air is thick with flak, and enemy pilots with the ominous designations "VET" and "ACE" surround you. I found that my runs almost always ended in this stretch. Almost always. As luck would have it, on a couple of occasions I got back-to-back easy objectives: a couple of ground installations I could hit with guided bombs, turn around, and bug out for a mission complete. But it frustrated me that I couldn't do so consistently enough to reach the Final Day and win. How the heck was I supposed to dodge all these salvos of rockets that could kill me in one to two hits?
It wasn't until I looked at forum chatter about the game that I realized the problem wasn't my technique, which was adequate to the task; rather, I was pursuing a dead-end strategy. Each aero and weapon has a relatively simple block of stats that nevertheless provides a profile of ideal and suboptimal uses. I'd been trying to come up with a jack-of-all-trades loadout that could dogfight, bomb buildings, and strafe artillery and naval targets about equally well--but the chassis that could mount all those one-off weapons was too slow to outpace the deadly weaponry of the ACEs. When instead I built two loadouts, an interceptor with long-range antiaircraft weapons to thin out aerial threats, and a bomber to clean up the ground afterward, I immediately found Days 5+ much more manageable!
If that cycle of planning airplane builds, then testing their efficacy in target-rich skies sounds fun to you, you'll have a blast with Sky Rogue. Available on Itch for $20!
* It bugs me when I've solved the puzzle in my head, but the technical follow-through on the solution is hard to execute. This is why I bounced off World of Goo and to a lesser extent Braid.