Friday Night Fail: Crash and Burn Edition

I do love me a good flying shooter game. While not so much into the realistic sim flying titles, such as Flight Simulator, give me an arcade-style jet game like Ace Combat 6, HAWX, and the amazing Crimson Skies and I'm a happy gamer (as a side note: why is there no next-gen sequel to Skies? You mean to tell me that a new 50 Cent game can get greenlit but Crimson Skies 2 can't? Epic fail).

So I approached the Xbox 360 game Over G Fighters with high hopes, being what looked like (at least according to the back of the box) a decent flying game. Sadly, those hopes very quickly crashed into the ground once I started playing the title.

I'm going to breeze past the sub-par graphics, lame story, crappy sound, the fact that the game completely froze while I was playing, and all of the other technical fail that makes up this game, and focus instead on a couple of major issues that ground this game.

The first is a lack of identity. It can't decide if it wants to be a sim-style flight game or an arcade-style flight game, meaning that rather than going with one or the other it gets stuck in the middle with the worst features of both. A game like Ace Combat succeeds because it strips away a lot of the realism for a fast flying experience, and while you still have to deal with crashing into things and stalling out, stuff like fuel and realistically limited ammunition are gone in order to make the game more fun to play. Likewise, a simulation like Flight Simulator goes in the other direction and has the player focus on all aspects of flying a plane, eschewing the fast thrills for getting as close to the real thing as you can get without a pilots license. Both fill a particular need for the right type of gamer, both are good in their own right, but Over G Fighters tries to mash the two together and fails on all fronts. There are too many stats and not enough speed for the arcade gamers to get into, but it doesn't have enough stats and doesn't fly realistically enough for the sim players to enjoy.

The biggest problem this game has, though, is that aforementioned lack of speed. Jets are fast, and part of playing a jet game is that thrill of feeling like you're speeding through the clouds. The planes in this game, though, act more like they're moving through mud. Even at the top virtual speed, you're never given the sense of power that these machines have. The enemy planes are no faster, and in most cases you can lock on and fire from a pretty extreme distance. I destroyed quite a few enemies well before they were more than a small dot on my screen, and well before there was any tense action. There was no thrill, no sense of danger, just a button press when the little reticle turned red. When I did engage the enemy jets in a dogfight, it was more like battling with armed buses than soaring through the sky fighting for your life.

Over G Fighters tries to fill the needs of different flight game players, but ends up letting them all down. While other flight games soar, this one is better left in the hangar.