Well, I gave this genre a try.

• RaidersSpherePth
  

  11 hours playtime

  no achievements

This is a flight simulator, a genre whose controls I found to be more focused on being realistic rather than responsive. For example, rather than holding left turning you left, holding left tilts your plane, and your plane slowly starts to turn left while you leave it in its tilted state (but if you keep holding left, your plane will keep tilting, even going past you being upside down, etc.). So, if you miss your target and need to turn around, you need to tilt the plane until it’s near-horizontal, then hold down to tilt up, which speeds up the turn, but even doing all that, it takes a solid five (5) seconds to make a 180-degree turn. Plus, since the camera stays level with your plane, the camera tilts when you do, which can be really disorienting. Sure, there’s a radar, and it does help, but the radar can only detect your targets (as opposed to the nearby buildings and other obstructions, which will be your bigger enemy since crashing can kill you in one hit). In fact, the game’s challenge is less about shooting down the enemies before they shoot you, and more about fighting the controls and trying not to crash. The game knows this, too, since there are entire missions where you just have to navigate an empty hall without crashing, but these are ironically the easier missions since the obstacles are all presented head-on with plenty of room to react rather than in an arena with enemies hiding between two walls in a narrow hallway, meaning you need to approach just right in order to have a chance at hitting them.

Combat also strives to be realistic as well. This means that there are only two types of attacks: normal bullets that move too fast to be dodged (you just have to hope the enemy misses), and guided missiles. While the missiles can be dodged, there doesn’t seem to be much consistency with how to dodge them; sometimes, the same move that dodged a missile last time will get you hit the next time. The most consistent way to dodge them that I found was to make sharp turns, but that results in the aforementioned disorientation and possible risk of colliding with nearby walls that were just out of view (and I’m still not entirely sure if it’s a 100% guaranteed way to dodge them). Plus, if it’s one of those missions where the priority targets are in hard-to-lock-on positions, it may be better just to take the hit so you can finish the objective. I think I preferred Blue Lightning’s approach where you could also shoot the missiles down instead of dodging, even if that was technically less reliable due to all the smoke. Sure, that was an on-rails shooter rather than an arena-based flight sim, but I’m sure it could’ve been adapted for this game’s genre; maybe pushing a button could go into a sniper mode where you could aim at the missile and shoot it without losing your current trajectory.

Even the difficulty curve isn’t well implemented, being mostly flat with a few difficulty spikes. You’ll frequently find yourself clearing multiple missions in a row on your first or second try, only to reach one mission that makes you do something crazy and ends up being way harder than all the surrounding missions. For example, the third mission tasks you with defending an object from multiple fighter pilots, which are not only moving targets, but can also shoot missiles back at you, meaning you frequently have to put your attacks on hold just to stay alive. Also, since this is the third mission, you’re likely still trying to wrap your head around the controls. Oh, and lets not forget that enemy fighter pilots can dodge your missiles just as reliably as you can dodge theirs, making it impossible to hit them reliably (I beat the game and still can’t tell you what distance is too soon and what distance is too late). It is true that your planes also have machine guns, but not only do these have a much shorter range than missiles (the game literally won’t let you hit enemies if they’re too far away, regardless of your aiming skills), but they’re also significantly weaker than missiles, to the point where you’ll run out of time well before killing a single enemy with them. Needless to say, this one mission is a pretty big difficulty spike, and even after lowering the difficulty to Easy (which AFAIK only affects how often enemies shoot missiles at you), it still took a few tries for me to beat it–heck, I’m not even sure if there’s a way to do it without getting lucky (it might as well be random). The crazy thing is, right after this mission, the game goes back to having stationary targets with minimal resistance, almost like the devs knew that moving targets were too hard for newcomers (but then why not remove this mission from the game, or at least move it further in?). In fact, not only do fighter jets not become priority targets again until near the end (heck, the only real boss fight is a 1v1 against another fighter jet), but the game has an enemy that hovers in the air and shoots missiles, effectively being a stationary (read: easier) version of fighter jets, and they’re introduced during the next “defend this spot” mission, and even then, only the ground targets are the ones attacking the point. Sure, it’s another difficulty spike due to the fact that you still can’t see how much health the object you’re defending has (and the time it takes for said object to fall is much less than the mission’s stated time limit), but it’s much more reliable than the third mission.

However, I think my biggest issue is with the graphics. For the most part, it doesn’t matter since you can tell what and where everything is (as long as it’s in view of the camera). However, there are two missions where you need to fly dangerously close to a large, untextured obstacle: the first is during a “reconnaissance” mission where your targets are objects on the ceiling, and the second is near the end when you have to fly through a storm. For the recon mission, you at least have the benefit of your targets being their own model, which is much easier to tell the distance from, but you’re also being targeted by missiles during this mission (and you’re not allowed to bring your own missiles, either, so it’s not like you can fight back; you just have to avoid them), so it’s really easy to get turned around and end up with your plane pointing at a solid purple texture, even if your radar claims your target is right in front of you (or if you do somehow end up pointing at part of the ceiling that isn’t purple, the texture is far too blurry to tell how far away it is).

The storm mission has a cloud pattern as the texture on the ceiling and floor, but the walls are all a flat, grey texture. Not so bad at first, but there are parts where the game makes you fly through a narrow tunnel within said walls, and said tunnels have that same flat, grey texture all around the tunnels. Even with the lighting, you can barely tell which direction the tunnels twist and turn toward, and I’m 99% sure that the tunnel at 3km before your destination has zero lighting applied to it at all, meaning you’re once again flying straight into a flat texture with no way to tell where to go, only now you don’t have the ability to try reorienting yourself to look for a more clearly-defined object.

So yeah, I wouldn’t recommend this game. Honestly, if it weren’t for those two missions, I might’ve been able to say that flight-sim fans might like it if it’s on sale since it does have some variety with the missions, but I can’t see zero visibility being fun for anyone, especially on top of the other issues I mentioned.

P.S. Starting the game opens up an options window, with a drop-down menu claiming to have support for Anaglyph 3D. This is a lie; selecting the option does nothing.

P.P.S. This game has a bad habit of having dialogue appear during your mission, but unless you’re fluent in Japanese, you’ll need to rely on the auto-advancing text to understand what’s going on, meaning you’d need to take your eyes away from the game-play and risk not seeing potential hazards just to read it (ugh, it’s Astebreed all over again). This is especially frustrating during the tutorial because you risk missing the game tell you how to play, but pushing the pause button skips the tutorial!