Bomber Crew:
The first problem in Bomber Crew,
is the irrelevance of the campaign, the plane, and the crew. While
Bomber Crew pretends to include a campaign, this is a facade.
A campaign needs to value its resources, but the developer cares
little about implementing features which distinguish the plane and
crew. The player can only hire a full compliment of crew, but no
more. New members can only be hired when current crew perish.
Therefore, Bomber Crew doesn't allow any substitution of crew
members between missions. Even if the player was able to select
between various extra crew, it wouldn't matter because all crew
members are identical. Crew have few distinguishing features, and
only their quality level is relevant. Whether they have flown twenty
missions or ten, there is little difference between a veteran and a
green replacement. Replacements are only a quality level or two
lower. Somewhere, the Royal British Air Force has an inexhaustible
reserve of experienced crew men to replace slightly more experienced
bomber crews.
Unlike a proper campaign, crew injured
on a mission are entirely unaffected. They don't require rest,
suffer a penalty, nor incur a permanent injury. They return to the
barracks fully restored upon landing, no matter how grievous their
ordeal. The only pain the player suffers with the loss of a crew
member is the discomfort of refitting them with new equipment (old
equipment is lost with the crew) which is both expensive and
tiresome, because as mentioned previously, the Bomber Crew
doesn't allow the player to create equipment presets.
The plane suffers from exactly the same
issue. To begin, Bomber Crew allows the player access to only
one type of plane. When the plane is destroyed, a replacement plane
is provided, free of charge. But the replacement plane is
essentially the same as the original. For some odd, unexplained
reason, the engineers in charge of the airfield favor improved
engines, guns, equipment, and the fuselage, and disregard the
internal systems (hydraulics, oxygen, radar, electronics), and
survival gear. Over the experience of at least a half dozen planes,
this trend remained true.
In Bomber Crew, losing people or planes
is insignificant because the game always provides replacements, which
are nearly free, nearly as good, and nearly indistinguishable from
those which are lost.
The lack of campaign isn't rescued by a
superior visual effect. Bomber Crew attempts a simple,
cartoon look, which comes off as blocky and simple. One successfully
distinguishing feature, is that, while crew members speak in a
wordless mumble, they do so in a variety of voices. The player can
also decorate their plane with a selection of color styles, clip art,
and waist text. The font for the waist text is either boring or
dull, and the game allows some customized decorations, but the
template for creating them is imprecise and doesn't allow for text.
The coolest visual effect of Bomber
Crew is the depiction of the fuselage under a hail of bullets.
Each strike tears off a piece of paint, leaving a hole, so upon
returning to the runway after a particularly dangerous mission, the
plane looks like Swiss cheese. It bears every scar like a badge of
honor. But Bomber Crew employs other effects with less
success. Occasionally the airbase commander offers advice, but the
display is absurdly large, blocking the vision of at least a third of
the screen, and this visual effect can't be removed voluntarily. One
can only wait helplessly until the obstruction vanishes. Most
disorienting is the effect of a crash. When the plane falls to
earth, it splits apart at the seams, pieces scattering left and
right. But when it splashes into the sea … the effect is the same.
The plane reacts to the ocean as if it were solid land. No splash,
no sinking beneath the waves, and the parts bounce across the water,
littering the sea.
Before concluding, a few comments on
the Bomber Crew USA AF expansion. The differences between the
original and expansion are limited. USA AF adds two guns, and two
gunners, to the plane. All the available guns are equipped with an
ammo feed, meaning gunners never have to leave their turret to pick
up additional ammo. While one might expect the USA AF missions to
occur in the Pacific, they are based in the Mediterranean, with the
planes launching from North Africa. This creates an issue of
confusion. In Bomber Crew, enemy planes refused to fly over
Great Britain, making it a safe space. In the Bomber Crew USAAF
expansion it is impossible to tell when the crew is safe. Also,
bombs don't effect aircraft characters?!?
Other issues in no particular order
(and these are a mix of issues from the base game and the USAAF
expansion)
One mission asks the player to bomb
moving ships, but targeting them causes the pilot to fly directly
towards them. This makes the mission nearly impossible, because he
doesn't fly to intercept its path. As a result, the plane always
ends up passing behind the ship. Then the player has to attempt
improbable shots, but the player has only four bombs with which to
hit three targets. The difficulty of intercepting the ship makes
this mission frustrating for no reason.
And
finally, Bomber Crew feels incredibly sparse, because
the player never sees any allied aircraft. Even allied ships are
rare. Not once in sixteen total hours did Bomber Crew provide
an allied plane. The D-Day invasion was particularly underwhelming.
No planes, and only five to ten allied ships which were only there to
act as filler.
Normally Awkward Mixture doesn't review
a game without completing it first. For the blog I've made a
particular effort to finish games that I normally would abandon.
It's often difficult to gain a comprehensive understanding of a gain
without reaching its ending. But after sixteen hours of Bomber
Crew two thoughts materialized in my mind. Bomber Crew wasn't
going to change, and it was too frustrating to finish.
In conclusion, Bomber Crew is a
very simple simulator pretending to be a campaign. Planes and crew
are interchangeable, and easy replaceable. Each mission is
remarkably similar to the next. And each mission is mostly
nothing, punctuated by moments of extreme danger, where everything
goes wrong simultaneously, and the player can't do much more than
pray that everyone survives.
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