Altitude0: Lower & Faster Preview

Altitude0: Lower & Faster is a rather nice concept, you race planes as low and fast as you can through gates and obstacles against real people, not AI pilots, all to the sound of a pretty decent rock soundtrack. So far, so 1980s teenage dream, right? Unfortunately, that’s pretty much it for praise.

One thing you really need when it comes to a race game is a control scheme that feels “tight”. You need responsiveness if you are going to have a hope of making something playable, and sadly Gugila seem to be of the opinion that laggy, spongy controls make a good racer. It’s hard to not get Clarksonesque in describing just how bad the control system on this game really is.

You get the usual pitch and yaw controls, boost and the like as you would expect from something trying to be Burnout in the air, but it just never felt to me like what I was doing with the keys really meant much. More that you were suggesting to your plane that it might be nice if it went “over there somewhere”, but only if it thought it was a good idea. I have spent a lot of time playing racing games of various types and when Altitude0: Lower & Faster came up as a possibility for preview I jumped at it. I was looking for something that would bring me an enjoyable change from racing cars around a track. Sadly, this was not what I got.

I mentioned a “1980s teenage dream” at the start of this preview, and I meant it. The music by LastDayHere is straight out of a 1980s Saturday morning cartoon like Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, but the graphics are not quite goofy enough to be endearingly cartoonish, merely annoying in their simplicity. I realise that as an Early Access game this is an unfinished product, but really, there are limits.

It’s hard out there for Indy developers. I have a couple of them as friends and knowing what they have gone through over the years trying to get their products made and published means I have more than a little sympathy for the Early Access model. It means you can get some revenue coming in to keep the lights on while you continue to work on your game. In a lot of instances this is all that keeps the wolf from the door for small one and two person teams. It’s not a sure thing though, for your game to succeed and be something playable, you have to be creating something worth the 14 quid you’re asking for and sadly, right now, Altitude0: Lower & Faster just isn't. There’s an inkling of brilliance here, some concepts like the lack of A.I pilots are great. Each and every flier you go up against is human and you can tell, they really do fly like total madmen (so did I). It’s just a shame that the rest of the game isn’t up to that standard.

Steam Workshop support will hopefully enable Gugila to work more on the basics, but I for one will not be holding my breath,