Review: Flight Control HD

I  usually type out a list of points that I wish to include in the review. Here's an example for this game that I just reviewed on Steam.

Flight Control HD
* What it says on the tin, a casual flight control simulator in 2D
+ Simple graphical style fits well
+ It's fun and challenging
+ Turbo mode
  + ...which turns off when something is going awry
- When there's lot of aircraft on the screen, it's difficult to make out where the possible danger is happening
+ 9 levels
  + Special features of some levels
    + Wind
+ Fun, challenging achievements
* 3 hours

On to the review of Flight Control HD!

*****

Flight Control HD

Briefly: Flight Control is a decent, casual flight control simulator in 2D.

Now, Flight Control HD has little to do with flight control. Surely, there are planes, helicopters and airports and surely, you don't want aviational vehicles to collide with each other. Other than that, it's just fun and casual management of emerging chaos in pastel colours.

Planes on a plane!

You do get to control colourful planes. They randomly appear from the edge of the screen (with a convenient warning). If you wish, a handy tutorial will show you the ropes, but controls are fun and easy: just drag a path for the plane with mouse. Ideally, the path would end up in an airport, because points are scored for landing planes successfully. Each plane has a specific airport to land coincident by their colour.

You lose if two aircraft collide with each other. Since the game is in 2D this is hard to prevent for long.

While waiting for the inevitable, you can speed up the game. Conveniently enough, if two aircraft are on a collision course the game slows down to normal pace and highlights the two aircraft.

Even though this is nice, the highlighting backfires when there are many aircraft on collision course at once. It becomes difficult to see where the most urgent flying machine is. So you lose. And try again.

Dispelling the illusion

Initially I tried to do nice and pleasant-looking arcs and long-winded landings with the planes but I quickly noted that the planes can actually do 180 degree turns, which dissolved the simulation aspect.

Still, with a large enough number of planes to control, it does become difficult to manage. Different planes travel at different, albeit constant, speed with many having the same airport to land in adding to the complexity. A single game lasts just a few minutes at a time.

There are 9 different levels with varying difficulty (size, variety of planes) and even a couple with special features, e.g. wind that closes up certain airports. Special features are nice but they are only in place in few levels. There's a minor random element in most levels of slightly changing positions of the airports, of course coupled with a randomized appearance of planes.

A word on music: there's the same jolly, easy-going tune in most levels. Just a couple of levels have a special tune to fit their special theme. While the song is fine, it curiously stops after a while and doesn't resume for some time leaving you alone with the minor sound effects of collision alert and successful landing celebrations. Which are fine. It just weirds me out that the music is off for so long.

Conclusions

Even the nine levels do not last forever. There's content for a few hours of fun. For myself, 3 hours were spent on achievements, which were actually very well thought and enabled additional meaningful challenges. Then I spent an hour or so trying to beat my friends' highscores, regrettably without success. Consequently, leaderboards may or may not generate a few more hours of gameplay for you if you are so inclined.

The price is pretty good but since it is already an older game (almost 6 years old as of writing this), I'd recommend getting it on sale.

Review: Umbra: Shadow of Death

Hi! Another review! I posted this review of Umbra: Shadow of Death just a week ago on Steam. Here you go!

*****

Umbra: Shadow of Death

Briefly: Umbra is a rough gem, a physics puzzle platformer with a creepy setting. Visual style similarity borrowed from Limbo works splendidly and the game has still a nice amount of its own surprises to show.

Reading some other reviews out here, I admit Umbra does strike some similarities to Limbo especially in the first couple of levels and in the visual style. The similarities end there, as Umbra does its own thing while keeping being a physics puzzle platformer.

Story is pretty simple. Sisters get abducted by aliens. Fortunately for you, the big sis, the robot who took you breaks down and you escape to save your little sister.

Borrow a little something

That guy looks familiar.

While doing it extremely well, Limbo was hardly the first platformer using unfair traps: they were there in e.g. Dragon's Lair (NES version) and I Wanna Be The Guy (which took it to the extreme).

Umbra also has many mean surprise traps. In fact, you are likely to die to 95% of the traps when encountering them for the first time. Especially first and second levels are basically tributes to Limbo in this sense.

After that the differences grow larger. For one, big sister can swim and dive, permitting a couple interesting but oh, so slow-paced water puzzles. The character is slow at swimming and water takes aeons to drain or refill. Later on one gets to drive a truck through a couple of puzzle and death-filled levels and finally even carry and shoot a frickin' plasma LMG.

Puzzles are not as awesomely well made as in Limbo (duh) but they get the job done. In-game hint system keeps you from being stuck while actually being a hint instead of just telling the answer. Granted, most puzzles in Umbra aren't that difficult to require more than a simple pointing finger as a hint.

Danger and death everywhere

Unfortunately while cool, the truck levels were also the most frustrating in the game. This is because that later the game gets stingy with check points. There's a couple of 5-10 minute sequences where one can screw up in the end and have to restart in the beginning.

Deaths are not only due to traps. Fall damage is everywhere, as the protagonist can take only a couple of meters fall before dying or hitting her head. A little miss step and you're dead. There's even a sneaky surprise trap that uses this and consequently makes you drop carefully down every edge afterwards.

I also died many times because of faulty, buggy physics: by falling into the small crack in-between two crates and somehow being crushed; by impaling into the spikes that were on the underside of the moving platform I just climbed on; by peculiarly not grabbing the ledge I thought I landed on and instead falling to my death. Only after the first playthrough did I learn to avoid these fallouts.

How do you even drive this thing?

I played Umbra with Xbox 360 controller although keyboard would likely have been just as well. All keys and buttons can be remapped.

Controls are pretty good and smooth as long as you stay on foot. The big sister runs, jumps, hangs, swings and climbs like a pro. There's a bug (or a feature?) on jumps that whenever one jumps straight up, the character faces right even if you started facing left. It can be annoying if you really want to grab that ledge left, directly over you.

Swimming is slow as heck, realistic though it is. Big sis can even dive and hold her breath for half a minute. On the edge of water it's a weird as the game differentiates between diving and swimming. I once randomly encountered a bug where I was diving in the air but couldn't move or drown either.

Levels can be quite big.

Later levels stage the truck. Since the controls are entirely on or off, you can only full throttle or not at all. This is unfortunate, as you need to drive slowly to avoid crashing the car, so you have to smash the drive key to reach a reasonable speed but not over-do it. Weirdly, if you drive backwards, you can't brake or speed up forward meaning it's impossible to stop on a lean platform. You guessed it: this leads to certain death.

Finally, as this is not a twin-stick shooter, the gun is rather clumsy to aim, controlling the slope with right stick while shooting with the action key. When you get a gun, obviously you will be shot back. It's cumbersome to dodge the flashy blaster shots, as while carrying the gun you have to be stationary to crouch.

Also, there's no key to drop the gun that I could find, instead the gun just falls if you manage a slightly higher fall than a simple jump.

Technical side and style

If you read the above section, you can already tell that there are quite a many bugs and issues. I can only hope they will get fixed or alleviated somehow. That said, I really enjoyed my time with Umbra. Perhaps surprisingly I encountered no game-breaking bugs, and if one gets stuck (which unfortunately happened a dozen times) one could always restart from the previous respawn point.

Visually the graphical style fits Umbra marvellously. It's a bit more colourful than Limbo with some roughly but nicely coloured backgrounds every now and then, with red-yellow fire and the usual blue electricity.

Hanging around.

Even the Limbo guy makes an appearance as a rather obvious easter egg: there are side quest prisoners to save that strike a not-so subtle resemblance. No one explains how they got there though. Did the aliens get them too?

By the way, I enjoyed the soundtrack. It keeps the tone mysterious and dark but in an delightful way.

Conclusions

My very first playthrough was over 5 hours long, and then I did two playthroughs of about 2 hours to finish the rest of the achievements. There seems to be only one ending - I was hoping for a different one if I did a near-perfect run.

Umbra is after all a good game. It is rough around the edges and needs patience to finish. Plethora of bugs and lack of checkpoints in a few frustrating puzzles keeps it from being a great game. However, for a project done by a single person I can cut some slack. All in all I think it was well worth the price of 4 euros.