Gaming
Bomber Crew review or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bomber Crew
I still remember my first crash landing in Bomber Crew. My mission was fairly simple. Escort an Allied boat to an Axis port. It was a ‘critical mission’ and came with a high risk but I was confident.
Enemy fighters had been repelled fairly easily and as I blew up the last of the guarding submarines, I turned back towards home, having completed my part in the infamous St. Nazaire raid. Home. The waiting sanctuary of London and my runway.
That was when the shit well and truly hit the fan.
It started with a big increase in the number of enemy fighters. I’d taken a few flak hits completing the main objective but I figured I’d be okay. As we battled, an optional objective appeared. I turned to it, hoping I’d be able to sneak it in before I escaped. That was when the enemy fighter ace appeared.
Before I knew it I’d lost an engine. I lost my engineer, Flight Sergeant Oscar Wingrove, who bravely traversed the wing to keep the right side of the plane attached. My pilot went down and the electrics failed. A squad wipe was inevitable.
I’d learned the first and most important lesson of Bomber Crew. Don’t be greedy.
A frantic, chaotic WW2 rogue-lite
Bomber Crew is a strategy game based around piloting a Lancaster bomber. You start off with a basic plane, green crew and no equipment. As you fly missions, you begin to advance.
Your gunners might level up and get skills which improve their accuracy. You might decide to buy an extra gun turret for pesky low-flying planes. Worried about losing crew more than the plane? Deck them out in survival gear so that when you crash land, they stand a better chance at making it back.
Standard missions are fairly basic, designed to help you raise the money and exp you need to attempt the main story/critical missions. Each critical mission is historically accurate and much harder, offering a nice change of pace from the basic standard operations.
Controlling the plane is slick and moving your crew around is fairly intuitive, a good thing considering Bomber Crew is closer to a simulation than you might initially think. You’re required to control the hydraulics, landing gear and turret ammo. Oxygen levels and temperature can climb and plummet, making micromanagement necessary.
It looks excellent as well. The bold, cartoon graphics make for a great art-style that is accessible without compromising depth. Everything is clearly indicated and the stripped-back style helps in the middle of a storm, with flak exploding on every side while you try to set up for the next bombing run.
“Bomber Crew is closer to a simulation than you might initially think”
Bomber Crew puts a lot of effort into letting you create the narrative. You become attached to certain crew members and each choice you make, no matter how small, will determine their eventual fate. I quickly got attached to the crew of my first plane ‘Jolly Good Show’ and losing them along with the plane in one swift blow was gut-wrenching.
This aspect of player-made narratives makes up for the fairly basic standard missions. They lack variety and are mostly used to farm for the main missions, which have much better and more unique feeling objectives.
Bomber Crew is at its best when all of this comes together, when one of your crew makes a heroic play during a critical mission. When your plane limps out of a huge dogfight, you feel invincible. It’s a shame that sometimes these basic missions feel like a necessary grind to reach these moments.
If you read our initial impression, you’ll remember that we found Bomber Crew to be a manic love-letter to games like B-17 Flying Fortress and Cannon Fodder. Playing the full game confirms that. At its core, Bomber Crew is excellent.
There’s a lot of thought and a lot of heart on display from developers Runner Duck. If you’re a fan of frantic strategy, rogue-lites or WW2 bombers, Bomber Crew has a wide range on offer for those looking to tag along for the ride.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
- Gadgets10 years ago
Why the Nexus 7 is still a good tablet in 2015
- Mobile Devices10 years ago
Samsung Galaxy Note 4 vs Galaxy Note 5: is there room for improvement?
- Editorials10 years ago
Samsung Galaxy Note 4 – How bad updates prevent people from enjoying their phones
- Mobile Devices9 years ago
Nexus 5 2015 and Android M born to be together
- Gaming10 years ago
New Teaser For Five Nights At Freddy’s 4
- Mobile Devices9 years ago
Google not releasing Android M to Nexus 7
- Gadgets10 years ago
Moto G Android 5.0.2 Lollipop still has a memory leak bug
- Mobile Devices9 years ago
Nexus 7 2015: Huawei and Google changing the game