Bomber Crew — [PS4] Review
Taking to the skies in chaos
■ Visuals: 6.5/10, very cutesy and easy on the eyes. But visually not engaging or impressive enough to write home about.
■ Soundtrack/Audio: 6/10, gameplay audio was decent and what to be expected. Music is lacking and grows dull quickly.
■ Control/movement: 8/10, very easy to grasp and get into the swing to managing your crew.
■ Difficulty: 8/10, good balance of striking new comers to not only the game and genre without being overwhelming but challenging enough for veterans.
■ Replayability: 7/10, even with the chaos it’s a great kick back and relax game to excercise your brain and critical thinking.
Overall Score: 7.7/10
Sometimes I want to take credit for being a woman of the 21st Century. I work full time, single mom to a teenager, Community Manager for an amazing group of women at Girl Streamers, a doting girl friend, aspiring content creator, talent manager and so much more. I got the world in my hand and no one is stopping me. In other words, Girl, I Slay! Except if you were to ask me how I manage my life practically running almost 24/7 365, let’s just say my system is organized chaos and I have no idea how I get anything done or manage to not have a head full of white hair. So it totally makes sense that I decided to take on Bomber Crew and put my chaotic management to the test.
Bomber Crew is possibly the cutest micromanagement game out there. With their giant bobble heads you can’t help but think of your Nintendo Mii avatar in air fights, bombings, and gathering aerial photos. Visually it’s very clean, simple and straight forward to complement the cute crewmen. But where it lacks in complex visuals it makes up in the overall bigger scheme and focus of game play. In other words, visuals are simplified so you can better concentrate on your management skills.
You start off assembling a team of amateur crewmen and women. By amateur, I mean they probably walked in from a Penny Saver’s ad they read while drinking a coffee from their local gas station, just fills me with confidence in their skills. There you’ll pick a crew containing two gunners, a radio operator, an engineer, a navigator and obviously a pilot. Sounds simple enough, but you’ll find yourself getting lost in dressing your crew. Where you’ll be agonizing what headgear they should wear or weighing in the pros and cons of sacrificing safety for survive-ability. I can admit, in the end I went with what I thought looked cute. Most likely not the most efficient choice, but my crew was looking ….fly.
It was my bomber that I spent the most time and consideration in what I could do based on the money I earned. I spent much time weighing out my options from picking my turrets, engines, hydraulics, and electronics. While trying to figure out if I should have more first aids kits, fire extinguishers or parachutes. I choose first aid kits as the primary. I found myself in more circumstances needing them more than anything. What I found lacking was paint customization. Giving the initial impression that color schemes and decals was plentiful, I found it to be lacking and underwhelming.
Now that your crew and ride is ready, it’s time to take to the skies! Taking on missions and side missions will have you getting into dogfights, destroying rocket sites, ammunition storage or bombing boats and ground-based shooters. If you can manage your fights well you’ll find moments of opportunity to do a fly over and take photos to gather intel. After a while these missions start to become monotonous. Generally, it’s seeing your score get higher that gives you that sense of accomplishment and keeps you going.
Even with those missions, that’s not the core of the game. It’s managing your crew appropriately in the midst of all the action. You’ll be managing your shooters ammunition, timing your bomb drops or photo ops during fly overs, making repairs, healing injured crew members and updating way points. Many times I would forget to check back with a crew member, most times my engineer, to make sure they were on task. It was my prime frustration when after finishing repairs my engineer wouldn’t return to his seat. He’d be standing there doing nothing, just waiting orders. Others, it would be my shooters healing and not returning to their turrets to get back into the fight once fully healed.
If you fancy yourself to be a pro and want to test yourself, challenge mode can give you that. Offering you a mission much like a horde mode for the skies. Survive as long as you can through as many waves as you can, giving you some time between waves to repair and heal your crew before the next onslaught of fighters.
For this being my first experience and test of a management sim game I am pleasantly surprised by the ease control via controller. Initially, I was a bit uncoordinated, but found myself moving my crew and tagging enemies like a champ. It was the camera control I found to hinder my control the most. I would fight with my engineer trying to direct him to put out fires or make repairs. It becomes cluttered at times making it hard to select which crew member I need.
Overall, it’s a great introduction to the micromanagement genre. You can lose yourself and a whole evening to dogfights, bombings and customization options. But it’s the lacking of mission variety and camera movements that this game will quickly run it’s course and novelty.
Bomber Crew was provided to me via GirlStreamers Inc in return for a review.
