Fly TOGETHER! Review

I always get excited when I find new games to play locally with friends and family. Fly TOGETHER! is a game that has you creating flight paths for planes to get your passengers to their destination. This might not sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but when you can have up to eight people on the same screen all trying to make flight paths for their planes, chaos is bound to happen. So far I have only played with three players and it was already quite hectic. Though a lot of that could be the ages of the other players, and how they thought it was hilarious to constantly make the planes crash into mountains and the other flying planes.

Fly TOGETHER! is a motion control based game that works amazingly well. At first I was a bit worried about how good the motion controls would work after previously experiencing being burned with the Wii and its control scheme. Gone is the sensor bar and the crazy arm movements, Fly Together works better if you use small wrist motions to create your flight paths. It is easy to recenter your controls with just the hit of the Y button if you find them to be off, and if you don’t like the motion style control then it is easy to switch to using the thumbstick on the Joy-Con and holding it on it’s side. Use the A button to hold and drag your airplanes to make the flight path while you just do slight wrist motions to control where the plane will go. 

The graphics are bright and colourful with a cartoon-like aesthetic. The planes themselves are super cute and the environments remind me of a Settlers of Catan game with the hexagonal tiles. As you play the game you travel around different environments around the world that have you picking up and dropping passengers off the different colour coded locations they want to travel to. Each level has you trying to board and drop off as many passengers you can within the time limit. There are three stars placed on the progress bar that is located at the bottom of the screen. This bar keeps track of how many passengers you have successfully gotten to their destination. If you don't reach the minimum passenger requirement of the lowest star you will have to attempt the level again.  

As you progress through the different locales you will find blueprints for other aircraft that you will be able to unlock at your airport. To get points to purchase these you will have to complete the contracts given to you in the campaign mode. There’s a huge variety of neat ships that you can pilot like fighter planes, helicopters, hot air balloons, paper airplanes and even UFOs. Each aircraft has different stats that you can view when you are at your airport showing how many passengers can fit inside, how long it takes to board and unload the passengers and how fast the plane is. The more passengers that the plane can carry the more time it will take to get everyone on and off. 

The music in the game has a huge variety at times feeling relaxing or upbeat, capturing the feel of cheesy elevator mixed with music from a travel commercial quite well. Though overall It’s definitely happier than you would expect considering the amount of lives that must be lost every time you crash into a mountain or one of the other planes. If trying to avoid other planes sounds too simple. Don’t worry there are a ton more obstacles in store for you. Tornadoes, Tesla coils, mountains that you cannot fly over, turbulence that will push your aircraft in whichever direction the arrows are pointing and other craft that just randomly fly through the map and land at one of the airports. These planes do not like moving out of your way. So if you don’t want to be destroyed I suggest trying to avoid them. The nice thing is once they land, you can take control over the aircraft and use it as your own.

This also leads into one of the more fun and frustrating modes of the game. If you don’t want to try to work together as a team and cooperate, you can battle for the title of greatest airline pilot in battle mode. Here you fly in a variety of different maps where you try to make your passengers’ travel dreams come true and take them to their destination. Problem is all your opponents are fighting over limited air and landing strip space. To make matters worse if you aren’t careful one of your friends can take over your aircraft and use it as their own, or make your plane go on a massive detour. I have challenged this mode with four different players and it already felt crowded and hectic. I can’t even imagine the insanity of playing with eight people. It seems like it would almost be impossible to get anything done. 

Fly TOGETHER! is definitely a fun and casual game that would make a great addition to your game night. With a lot of different aircraft and environments to explore, the campaign mode keeps you busy for a while. Though I suggest if you decide to tackle cooperative mode, make sure to communicate a lot or else I predict a lot of crashes in your future. If you manage to get eight people together locally to try out that insane battle mode, be sure to leave a comment and let us know how it goes. It seems like a sure fire way to get incredibly annoyed and confused at the same time.