It’s the second week, and the same deal as the first: play games, write briefly about games, be unreasonably annoyed at a simulator. Let’s begin!
AI War: Fleet Command
AI War is a sprite-based space RTS. That’s probably where this bit should end because, in all honesty, I couldn’t get beyond ten minutes. Not because AI War is a bad game necessarily, but it’s just so dense. Clicking on your headquarters brings up paragraphs of explanatory blurb, and multiple options each with lines of explanation. If you want an in-depth RTS, by which I mean a really bloody in-depth RTS from what little I saw, this may just be for you!
Rating: Hey, you might like it / 10
Airport Simulator 2014
The last simulator game I played led to a weird, rambling narrative as opposed to a first impression. Therefore, as an experiment, I’m going to set a template before I actually begin the game. Hopefully, whatever the game may throw at me, this will mean I’ll have something well-rounded and informative to say. Okay, here goes:
Airport Simulator 2014, by United Independent Entertainment, aims to replicate the hustle and bustle of a real-life airport environment. While playing, I felt that…
(Okay, so now I’ll play and come back with some constructive thoughts.)
…
Ahem… While playing, I felt so fucking bored. Ah, sorry, I felt that I was SO FUCKING BORED. All you do, all you ever do, is drive to specific points around a landed plane at a realistic (i.e. really, really, painfully slow) pace, and park. You just park. And then you get another vehicle – maybe it’s the maintenance truck, maybe it’s the luggage handler, maybe it’s the fucking tunnel thing that passengers walk through – and you drive it, and you park.
Okay, so, what are you going to expect from Airport Simulator? Surely there’s not much more they could have done. Yeah, fair enough. Only, once you’ve parked all the shit you have to park, you have to wait for them all to finish their work. So you wait for minutes upon minutes, the longest, most excruciating minutes of your game-playing life. You wait, you drive, you park, and you wait. It repeats. The cycle never ends.
But, hey, at least it’s not as bad as Agricultural Simulator!
Rating: DRIVE PARK WAIT DRIVE PARK WAIT DRIVE PARK WAIT / 10
Alien Breed 2: Assault
Mediocrity, thy name is Alien Breed 2: Assault. Everything about the game screams middle-of-the-road. It’s a bland, top-down shooter where you play as a heavily armored marine-type shooting all sorts of aliens in a run-down wasteland that might’ve been some form of paper factory. It’s perfectly adequate in almost every area. The guns have some kick, the aliens are modeled by someone who you’d guess has at least some experience in modeling creatures, but there’s absolutely nothing excellent about it. Even the name is dull, for Christ’s sake.
Rating: 5 / 10 Yeah, seriously. This is a game so entrenched in its own nothingness that it can absolutely be summarized by a rating of 5.
Altitude
A gloriously simple to play yet difficult to master airplane shooter. My fear going into this, having last played Altitude around three years ago, was that there would be no one else playing online multiplayer, thus making the whole experience redundant. Thankfully, and probably due in no small part to the game becoming free-to-play, this wasn’t the case. I had the choice to play either the conventional free-for-all shoot everyone out of the sky mode, or the tremendously fun soccer (or, inventively, ‘Plane Ball’) mode. Both of which were full of fools awaiting death.
The controls are sublime. Your plane basically follows your mouse cursor. The acts of successfully shooting down a plane and establishing multi-kills are so satisfying that they seriously make me question my pacifist outlook.
Rating: The game that made me like planes again, in spite of Airport fucking Simulator / 10