Airplane Flight Simulator: Dangerous Landings

Genre: Flight Sim

Players: 1

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Review:

A while ago, I reviewed 2018’s Airplane Flight Simulator, and suffice it to say, that game was an absolute disaster. The listing on Nintendo.com was deliberately misleading and had images that clearly weren’t from the Nintendo Switch release of the game, and the game itself was absurdly buggy to the point where you could fly through mountains and crash into the invisible floor multiple stories above the ground.

Apparently developer SC Ovilex Soft decided to try to make the best of the bad situation and salvage what it could from that wreckage of a Flight Sim… to make a game all about plane crashes. My, how apropos. Released in 2024 on Nintendo Switch, Airplane Flight Simulator: Dangerous Landings is a Flight Simulator where players must safely land planes in dangerous situations, such as when an engine explodes, or the plane is dangerously low on fuel, or the landing gear won’t extend. It’s a fairly unique focus for a game, and one I can’t say I’ve seen in other Flight Sims, so it has that going for it.

Having said that, Dangerous Landings has already gotten off to a pretty rocky start by repeating some of the same mistakes as its predecessor, and once again we have to compare the above image, taken directly from Nintendo Switch gameplay, to the below image of the game taken from Nintendo’s webpage for the game:

While these images are taken from different angles, they depict the same scene – you can clearly see one of Madrid’s Europe Gate towers on the far left of both images. You can already tell by looking at said tower that the images the publisher has provided have textures that are far better than what’s actually in the Nintendo Switch game, and the fire and smoke from the damaged engine is also far less detailed in the actual Nintendo Switch screen grab. Suffice it to say, if you want to convince me you’ve turned over a new leaf, starting off by lying about what your game actually looks like is not the way to go.

To the game’s credit, it does have some landmarks and more detailed cities than were seen in the first game, no doubt due to this game’s much more limited scope (you won’t be making any especially long flights – you’ll mainly be concerned with landing a flight that starts in mid-air). Unfortunately, there are plenty of other issues with this game’s presentation to point to. The framerates are absolutely terrible, to the point where they can slow to a slide show in places (just taking this page’s screen grab caused it, for example). There are some really nasty blurry ground textures too, horrible pop-in and shadow pop-in, and just overall this game looks cheaply-made and ugly.

These visuals are joined by unimpressive plane sounds, and generic actiony music that bounces between generic electric guitar themes and music that sounds like it could have come from some horror film.

I suppose Dangerous Landings is better than its predecessor because it actually functions on a basic level, even if it doesn’t function well. The plane controls seem inconsistent and it’s difficult to make minor adjustments to the throttle. And players hoping to complete an entire flight will be disappointed unless you select the game’s “free roam” mode, where you’re given the choice of one of three cities to fly around. Unfortunately, this mode seemed to suffer some of the worst graphical issues, and only three cities feels very limited.

The game’s missions are more limited and brief, but also seem better-structured in a way that helps to keep the game’s major flaws in check. Unfortunately, there are only 15 of these very brief levels, meaning you’ll likely be done with the majority of this game very, very quickly.

So is Airplane Flight Simulator: Dangerous Landings the absolute disaster that its predecessor was? Not quite, no. But it’s a game with a much smaller scope that still manages to have almost all of the problems of the prior game. It may be better, but Dangerous Landings is still an absolutely terrible Flight Simulator, and I strongly recommend that you skip it.

tl;dr – Airplane Flight Simulator: Dangerous Landings is a Flight Simulator that marginally improves on its disastrous predecessor and presents an interesting theme of recovering from airplane disasters, but ultimately still suffers from far too many of the issues that plagued the previous game. Even though this is an improvement, it is still an absolutely terrible game, and I cannot recommend it.

Grade: D-

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