DickDastardly
May 25, 2018
Cool but flawed
I have fairly mixed feelings about this experience. On the one hand, it's perhaps the most ambitious app in the Go store, allowing you to fly over most of Europe and America with accurately modelled 3d buildings (although they're auto-textured unlike the photo-wrapped buildings in Google Earth). The asking price is also very reasonable and if you're into flight sims, having an app that recreates at least part of the experience of something like FSX in a mobile headset you can take with you is pretty great. It's also impressive that all this is the work of a single dev. On the other hand, there are some pretty glaring flaws which currently stop me from rating it higher: Firstly, the cockpits are rendered 4 or 5 times the correct size so it looks like the instrument panel is 3 or 4 meters from your head (this totally destroys any feeling that you're in an actual plane, although it should be fairly easy for the dev to fix). Secondly, although the Go controller does a pretty good job of emulating a joystick (with rudder control on twist), the flight modelling is very very simplistic - it seems to be impossible to stall any of the aircraft; speed control via the touchpad is very janky (and it's impossible to fly slower than 2-300 knots which is too fast for sight seeing and unduly stresses the tile loading); there's no collision detection whatsoever; and there are no user controlled take offs or landings (when you get near an airport the plane autolands). Finally, performance isn't great. To be fair, headtracking is smooth throughout but the underlying simulation seems to be running at less than 20fps (a far cry from the silky smooth, though admittedly much less ambitious Ultrawings). Tiles also load in pretty late and there aren't any transitions or fades or even any rendering of distant terrain to which detail is added as you approach, rather one second there's nothing but a flat green grid and the next there's a square of terrain with buildings (which is pretty jarring and more or less forces you to fly at treetop height to reduce the visibility of unloaded tiles). Overall then, I think this has a lot of potential and I could easily see my rating rise to 5 stars with a fix for the cockpit scale issue, the ability to fly at less than half the current minimum speed, better throttle control (perhaps by drawing clockwise circles on the touchpad to increase speed and anticlockwise to decrease?) and some improvements to tile loading. It would also be nice to be able to select stuff in menus using the Go controller's trigger rather than having to click the touchpad, and to be able to select a starting location by clicking on a map rather than by laboriously entering latitude and longitude (which did at least work for me on the Go unlike other reviewers).
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