SimplePlanes Review

Look, I’m gonna be straight okay. I took this game because my boss thought it would be hilarious if I did. Let’s just say that intricately building planes and flying them is not my idea of a good time, so accepting his challenge (and the game) filled me with sudden and even instant regret.

I mean, I got pretty excited by the initial music which sounded like something Kings of Leon might have made but sans southern-drawling vocals. My face then kinda made a u-turn, an upside down one after being confronted with what is probably the most extensive tutorial I’ve ever seen. So of course I skipped through all of it. This was an unwise decision. How hard can it be to build and fly a plane, I thought. Turns out, like really, really hard.

So my first advice would be, do not skip the tutorial. I went back, like a good game reviewer should and started the tutorial. You’re probably gonna be spending at least an hour reading that bad boy. The main issue I found was remembering what all the technical jargon meant, honestly it was tougher than remembering the names of all the people in any given Game of Thrones episode. If you have some kind of plane simulator experience, or have seen Top Gun one too many times then you’ll be a fair few steps ahead of me in the comprehension department.

It is impressive though, there’s some serious detail that’s gone into the game. You can customise pretty much everything and anything, and there are some really well thought out tools to help you realise the flight-capable machine of your dreams/nightmares. Want your plane wholly symmetrical? Build one side and use the mirror tool to magic in the perfect other side. Want a total mish-mash of random parts with no hope of ever being airborne to throw into the sky and hope for the best? You can do that too.

And if you’re more into the flying simulation side of things, and aren’t really fussed about building the damn things, then get ye to Steam Workshop because there’s only about a million available for you to download. Come on, why not leave the crafting to the experts, unless you of course are an expert too. Are you?

It’s okay because the actual flying bit once you have a plane is a LOT easier. I mean there’s still five tutorial bits to get through before you’ll know what you’re doing, but it’s definitely easier. Of course having not gone through the instructionals (I’m excited that’s a word) initially meant that I may have crashed many, many times.

Right, it’s time for a confession. So recently I have discovered something about myself which had a genuine impact on my enjoyment of this game (other than skipping the tutorial and not wanting to play it in the first place). So I’ve been playing a lot of The Witcher 3 and there’s a lot of points where you’ll need to swim out into the ocean and dive down to collect stuff. Sounds simple right? WRONG! Turns out I am terrified of the open sea. Like, literally petrified of graphically-created water. 

So how is this relevant for SimplePlanes? Well turns out a lot of the flying you do is over endless, infinite, horrifying sea. And when you’re not very good at flying, well I’ll let you do the maths there. I guess it worked in my favour in this case because I had to play the game to review it so I found myself quickly picking up how to keep myself airborne, or at least how to crash on land rather than liquid. Turns out the controls are fairly simple when you go back and actually do the tutorial.

Okay, so by this point it’s probably obvious that this game is not the one for me, not by any stretch of the imagination and it will, no doubt stay untouched in my Steam account from here on out. However I would be a fool if I didn’t acknowledge how great this game is for people who might enjoy this genre. I imagine the thrill of getting a machine you’ve spent hours on perfecting into the sky is quite satisfactory, and the replay value is crazy due to the sheer amount of crafting possibilities.

It’s a well made game, the graphics are good, the flying is easy to get to grips with and the tutorial is exceptionally helpful if you just give it a chance. I highly recommend checking out Steam Workshop because that adds even more to an already jam-packed offering. Nice work, Jundroo. I may not have enjoyed it, but I have to give it a high score.