A Glider’s Journey

Genre: Flight Simulator

Players: 1

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Review:

A Glider’s Journey is a simple, family-friendly Flight Simulator released on PC in 2019 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021. In this game, players control a glider as it flies over, under, around and through an abstract polygonal landscape in the sky, going through hexagonal wings until you reach a platform and land on it.

The presentation here is stylistically quite nice, presenting some colorful and nice-looking terrain floating in the sky, with some imaginative geometry and a peaceful isolated atmosphere that is backed by some nice New Agey music. However, on a technical level, things aren’t so good – despite the low-poly environments, there’s still a lot of noticeable pop-in on things like trees and foliage, and some elements that react to your passing do so in sudden, jerky movements that were clearly not as intended. These graphical flaws really detract from the otherwise placid atmosphere of the game.

The gameplay here is exceedingly simple, just having you follow a path of hexagonal rings until you reach a platform that you’re meant to land on. Unfortunately, this gameplay is too simple, and apart from times when it’s not clear exactly where the next ring is, there’s not really any challenge here – simply follow the designated path and don’t bump into anything, easy-peasy.

You can opt to make things more challenging by enabling “realistic” controls, but this doesn’t make the game seem any more realistic, it just makes turning far more awkward and cumbersome, meaning that you’re not adding challenge, you’re just making the gameplay worse.

For a game as simple as A Glider’s Journey, the $10 price tag seems far too high. While this game does theoretically have some nice scenery, this is undercut by performance issues, and the simple Flight Simulator gameplay just does not offer enough of a challenge to keep players’ attention for very long. Unless you’re looking for a Flight Sim that’s so simple it’s virtually brain-dead, skip this one.

tl;dr – A Glider’s Journey is a simple, family-friendly Flight Simulator where players guide a glider through a series of rings to reach a landing platform. Unfortunately, the gameplay here is so simple that it lacks any sort of fun or challenge, and the stylistically nice presentation is undercut by performance issues. This might have still been an okay time-waster, but $10 is just too much to ask for a game this simple. Unless you want “Baby’s first Flight Sim”, skip this game.

Grade: C-

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