Ultrawings Flat

Genre: Flight Sim

Players: 1

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Review:

Ultrawings Flat, elsewhere called Ultrawings VR, is a Flight Sim released on the PC and PlayStation 4 in 2017 and ported to the Nintendo Switch in 2019. As you might have guessed from the prior sentence, this was a game that was originally designed with VR headsets in mind, but sadly there’s no Nintendo LABO VR support here.

Visually, this game is not going to impress anyone. Simple, low-poly 3D graphics suffice for the gameplay, but do little to truly sell the experience of actually flying. I will at the very least give the game credit for making good use of shadows, which does add a bit of realism into an otherwise simplistic presentation. This is paired with unimpressive plane noises, instructions read aloud to you through a crackling intercom via an unnamed woman, and some pretty terrible boppy music that I’m pretty sure is public domain garbage.

Getting into the game, its VR origins are made painfully clear in its menus, which are navigated in first-person perspective in a way that’s nowhere near as elegant with just a gamepad. What may have been immersive with a headset is just cumbersome and awkward here.

However, once you get over the lacking visuals and interface issues, the actual gameplay at its core here is quite good, and brings to mind the classic Pilotwings games of old, with players’ main challenge being the simple navigation of their aircraft to complete various tasks. At its best, this game brings to mind the feeling of freedom and the challenge of flight that those classic games had.

The problem here, unfortunately, is the way game progression is handled – players are only given a handful of possible missions to undertake at any given time, and they don’t feel all that varied, especially when comparing it to the wide array of vehicle types Pilotwings had. However, even beyond that, players are made to actually manually travel from one island to another to “buy” that new location and gain access to new missions, an idea that’s clever in theory but in practice it’s just another annoyance.

Ultrawings Flat has the elements of an excellent Flight Sim, and it could have been one if more work was made into providing players with a wider variety of activities and making the game progression smoother… and the graphics were improved… and the music… okay, yeah, this game needs a lot of work. But fans of the classic Pilotwings games may still find some value in this game, at least if they can overlook its flaws.

tl;dr – Ultrawings Flat is a Flight Sim that follows in the footsteps of the Pilotwings series, and the core gameplay here is excellent, but everything else is a mess. Sub-par graphics, terrible music, lacking options, bad menu interface, frustrating game progression… if you can look past this game’s laundry list of problems, there’s still some real enjoyment to be had, but as-is it’s a bit of a mess.

Grade: C

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