BOMB: Who let the dogfight?

Have you, or anyone you know A) Played Crimson Skies? B) Wanted to live vicariously through an alcoholic frenchman? C) Experienced terrible customer service that left you foaming at the mouth and require someone to restore your faith in humanity? If you answered yes to any of those question this game might be right for you! BOMB allows you to live out your Porco Rosso fantasies such as verbally abusing your companions and engaging in nail biting aerial combat. This game is FUN. Although it might not be a 100% accurate sim experience it is a nice break from the stress of DCS World/IL2 mechanics, and does not require an expensive Track IR and joystick setup (although joystick is recommended because mouse controls are a bit wonky right now). There are 3 views, pretty classic, 3rd person, cockpit (my personal favorite) and 1stperson no cockpit (why people fly like this i have no idea) Cockpit features lots of gauges and doohickys, all of which seem to function. Cockpits are also unique for each flyable plane, which seems obvious but is lacking in some other flight games. It features believable planes that are a cool mix of prop and jet/rocket fighters. You can usually guess which realworld aircraft inspired them by how they handle. Weapons usually consist of your stock machine guns and your choice of cannons/flak guns and other options. The game features multiplayer but i have not yet tried it, I think ill stick with the story for now. One last note, the support is awesome. Email with an issue and you can expect a quick reply and fix within days. They're helpful and courteous, and even though my specific issue has yet to be solved they told be to expect a fix in the next patch. Worth a buy for this alone. My only negatives are that mouse control and optimization could use some work (both are being worked on by the development team) And that I would like to see more planes added (but to be honest, my ideal flight game features hundreds of unique planes, so take that with a grain of salt) Happy Flying!

Many games - Blazing Angels, AirConflicts and now Bomb - have tried to emulate Crimson Skies' success and failed miserably! Why? Because it isn't simply enough to take an arcade aircombat shooter and combine it with a more or less interesting story. Yes, Crimson Skies backstory is pretty interesting, as are the characters and the dialogues are witty. But this is just the glue that holds it all together. The secret of Crimson Skies success is, it gives you the illusion to be this daredevil fighter pilot who not only kicks his opponent's ♥♥♥ like an ace but who is also a skillful stunt pilot. The environments in Crimson Skies are interesting and challenging, while in the above mentioned games they are only beautiful window dressing. What a wasted opportunity! The only game I can think of that uses the environments the same way Crimson Skies did, is DogFighter. But this game is only a multiplayer platform. One moment you fly through the Great Canyon - the next through an Egyptian pyramid... Why? You are shooting at areoplanes! Why? Everything in this games feels complete arbitrary! Who knows? If the developers had invested in an interesting story driven campaign... this just might have been the next Crimson Skies! And finally - Crimson Skies only fault was... it came at least 10 years too early! What an amazing game it would be with today's graphics! I wonder why nobody thought about remastering it!? It would be the license to print money! Unfortunately Bomb is falling short towards those expectations: the dogfights are tedious and repetitive (one basically cycles endlessly until an enemy plane comes in view and then tries to shoot it down). Worst of all: the saving points are too far apart. One has to fight off wave after wave of opponents (like swarms of mosquitos) and when one fails at the end of the mission one is forced to replay the last 20 minutes of tedious gameplay! This kills the game for me!

Oh boy, where to begin.... If you want the short version - the game is just not fun. If you want the long version - read on! So to start with, here are the pros of the game: + Interesting premise + The characters seem funny enough at times + It's nice to see the devs attempt to emulate Crimson Skies type games. And here are the cons: - No tutorial what's so ever, the game is not hard to figure out, but it would have been nice if they included one. - The mission pacing is awful, the first 3-4 missions last for about two minutes and just make you fly forward requiring minimal input from your end. They could have made them in to a single mission and it would have benefited the game. - The flight model is arcade, but not the fun type of arcade like Ace Combat. The gravity doesn't seem to affect your plane, it flies the same no matter which direction you chose, be that up or down and the rudders rubberband like crazy. It will swing you back to the direction you came from the moment you release the turn button. I would also like to point out that it feels like you are flying though molasses instead of air. - The environments look extremely bland and the trees flicker like crazy when you fly over them, the planes look nice, but everything else looks like an late Xbox / early360 game. - The performance is spotty at best, I was getting frame drops from 80 to 20 while nothing was happening on the screen and it doesn't look like a game that should ever drop below 60 on a 290X even on the highest settings. - The menus look like they are placeholder, especially the options screen and the mission failure one. - And the main con of all that just made me quit for good? It just wasn't fun. I love flight game like the Crimson Sky, Ace Combat, Blazing Angels, Sky Crawlers, etc, and this is a disgrace compared to all of them. I do not recommend this game unless you find it on sale.

As of Mk IIIb: Like arcadey flight sims? Have a gamepad or joystick/hotas? Loved Crimson Skies? Than most likely you're gonna like BOMB. Nice graphics, amusing storyline, cool art- and overall game- style, pretty good AI. Controls are not as tight as they were in crimson skies though, that needs some work. Plus, only one difficulty level for campaign (and not the easiest one) is quite tough (at least for someone like me who sucks using joysticks xD). Other than that - pretty damn good flight combat sim! More details in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH8taz0tnrg

Oh my... This game is excellent. It's not easy at all, even though it doesn't model planes realistically. Any comparisons made to Crimson Skies are pretty accurate. I'd say the flight model is similar to War Thunder on "arcade" but the planes are considerably less maneuverable. Considering you're flying a twin engine cargo plane, that's expected. The dialogue that strings the missions together is funny, brief, and to the point. "Go blow up the thing." There are bombs, rockets, torpedoes, and a variety of cannons that get strapped on the planes. Thankfully the missions do have checkpoints, and restarting a mission after failing is ZERO load time. I'm playing with a Logitech 3D Pro stick and it works perfectly after button mapping. The game is set up for a 360 gamepad by default. It also supports mouse control BUT that isn't quite working just yet. Views are cockpit, 3rd person, and no-cockpit gunsight views. Hold a key/button to momentarily padlock the current enemy, so you don't get lost in all the chaos. There's multiplayer, and even a dedicated server you can download. I played some skirmish with the AI, and had them turned up a difficulty notch plus had too many of them fighting me, and I can attest the my end was brutal and swift. :-) The only thing I really feel absent is a nice hammy voiceover of the character dialogue. The voice work in Crimson Skies was superb and really brought the game to life. Reading the text balloons just isn't the same. A pretty small complaint considering how much goodness is going on here for $12. DO IT.

Now that it's out of early access... It looked like a great game, it has a lot of potential, but the control support is awful. This is, without any doubt, the worst controlling game of any type or genre, that I've ever played since 1995. Really really really reeeeaaaallly awful. With a 360 controller, the handling ranges from pretty bad to terrible. With a flight stick... well, it just doesn't map functionally onto a stick, so forget about it. With the keyboard it's.... Jesus, it's real bad. Controls are a crucial part of any flight sim/arcade game and the control support isn't anywhere near being good enough to recommend.

This review is based on about 1 hour of playing through 5-6 missions, and I was blown away. I forced myself to stop playing just to post this. If you liked Crimson Skies or Wings of War, this game is right up your alley. I'm a life-long flight sim player who enjoys both simulations and arcade flight games, and this game has the special sauce. - Fun, varied missions. - Pretty, retro graphics in a beautiful tropical environment - Accessible yet realistic-ish flight model (as far as arcade flying goes) - Fantastic controls, especially with an XBox 360 controller (haven't gotten it to work with my joystick yet) - Laugh-out-loud funny dialogue and story. - Great artwork and aircraft design

A really cool game ! I missed the feeling of a good flight fight for a long time. For people liking airplanes games i think its a must have. The game is really nice with his own style, a special mention to the sea wich is beautiful. The solo campaign is quite good (i laughed a few times on some jokes) and the multi really upgrade the potential of the game. Even the "escarmouche" mode with AI (wich is pretty good) is interesting and challenging ! With the promise opening of modding i can't see why this game wouldn't be a sucess especially if people start making new content (more planes, more weapons, more everything). That's it, i'll go see "Marcel" for new adventures !

BOMB is bound to get more and more popular. The developers have been listening to suggestions in the duscution thread scince the first day and many improvements have been made thanks to that. If you are looking for an old-school style aircraft game with humour, old-style planes, challenging dogfights and various missions, this is for you !

Nowhere near ready to leave early access. Let me premise this with how I love the theme and gameplay. It really is a successor to Crimson Skies. Has/had a lot of potential, but looking at how rarely it's updated, I don't have much faith the following issues will be resolved: - Some aircraft do not have cockpits -The ones that do, the sights seem to not line up with the guns. Leading targets can be sporadic. If it's not the sights, then it's the following: - The primary machine guns do very, very little damage. You'll often waste 10+ minutes chasing a single fighter getting hit after hit, but they won't go down. - Text in many places is full of typos; poorly translated to english. - Some missions are very easy, then others ramp up in difficulty with no checkpoints or way to repair. - Overall lack of polish, between the GUI and lack of optimization