Face Pilot: Fly With Your Nintendo DSi Camera!

Genre: Flight Simulator

Players: 1

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Review:

Face Pilot is a Flight Simulator released on the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2010, and later grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when the Nintendo 3DS released. This game has players controlling aircraft and completing various goals.

For a $5 game that’s now 13 years old from a generation prior to the Nintendo 3DS, Face Pilot looks surprisingly decent, with simple but colorful 3D visuals, including your own face plastered onto your character. Granted, this isn’t a game that’s going to impress anyone today, but it is nevertheless still appealing in a quaint sort of way. This is all backed by a soundtrack with a mix of melodic and cheesy tunes, most notably the adorably silly Title Theme.

As for the gameplay, if you’ve played any games in the Pilotwings series, this is pretty close to those in terms of gameplay. Well, more specifically, it’s like the hang glider levels in those games, with players given a few different tasks in a small selection of levels, with multiple unlockable variants of the aircraft to use. It’s marred a bit by the game hiding the end destination in its levels until you complete other objectives and then forcing you to watch a distracting cutscene when it’s unveiled, but otherwise it is all fairly well designed with a good amount of variety in things to do, despite that all you’re doing here is aiming your aircraft.

Of course, for a game that’s built around its somewhat gimmicky motion control, the big question is going to be how do those controls work, and the answer here is… not all that bad, actually. The game does seem to have difficulty determining where exactly your head is, but it’s mostly decent at following your head’s movement, which is what counts. There were a few times when my desire to turn sharply caused my head to go off-camera, which caused a brief loss of control, and ultimately I feel like this game would be a lot more straightforward to play with more traditional gamepad controls, but it surprisingly didn’t detract too much from the experience being forced to twist and turn my Nintendo 3DS to steer (or alternately, the player can choose to set the Nintendo 3DS down and move their head around instead).

Is Face Pilot a full Pilotwings game in disguise? No, not really, there’s probably not enough content here for that… but there’s surprisingly quite a lot for its low price tag. Do the motion controls fully escape the label of “gimmicky and unnecessary”? Well, no, not quite, but they work well enough, and if it wasn’t for that this game probably wouldn’t have gotten made in the first place. Look, Face Pilot is far from a perfect game, but it’s surprisingly good for what it is, and I truly think that it’s absolutely worth getting for such a low price. If you have a Nintendo 3DS, be sure to pick this game up before the Nintendo 3DS eShop closes in March 2023 (later this month!).

tl;dr – Face Pilot is a Flight Simulator along the same lines as the Pilotwings series, built around the gimmick that you use the Nintendo DSi/Nintendo 3DS camera to track your head’s movements, which steer your aircraft. As gimmicky as that may be, it works surprisingly well, and there’s a pretty good amount of content here for a $5 game. At such a low price, I think this is a game you should absolutely try to get while you can before the Nintendo 3DS eShop closes in March 2023 (later this month!).

Grade: A-

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