TL:DR - "I have 16 minutes in the game and it felt like several insanely boring hours."
While an awesome and intriguing idea, this 'game' looks more like a students got assignment, got driven off by creating environment and forgot that it should be a game, so it's something like a point and click sequence as regarding gameplay, there is literally nothing related to plane accident investigation, player is more like a paper pusher and manual worker, there is literally not a single brain cell needed to 'play' this as the game does everything important itself, it only uses the player for mundane tasks like "pick this, carry it 15m and drop" or "stand here and aim there, then fake-take a picture" and that's hardly acceptable in case you expect an investigation sim game.
To explain myself:
As a light enthusiast regarding airplanes and a person who likes to learn about air crashes, I'm fascinated by the process of finding out what went wrong and that was my expectation of the game. I tried the demo going in with high expectations but the demo is clearly showing this game is the exact opposite of brain teaser. It starts with the tutorial, that leads you step by step trough every point of the investigation and when I say point, I mean it. You must mark the crash site - it shows you placeholders of the flags you need to place, then something starts burning so you need to extinguish it, then mark evidence with another set of flags. To see where the evidence (aircraft pieces etc) is, you 'use' a drone. I hoped this is simplified for the sake of the tutorial... more on that later. After that, you are told on which spots to step on and click with your camera to take photos of the scene, again, you can only take a photo from exact position in an exact direction. Then you open your phone to switch to second phase, which is having the case prepared in a hangar. Here you go though the case files on a table. You have to click on each folder, sometimes to click on items in it as well, while given little to no info and get several times pranked by the fact that Esc opens menu instead of closing the folder/computer interface. Note here - there is a folder with the photos which you made which are not even screenshots from you making them, but pre-made pics. Then you must manually place 3 hypotesis post-it notes on a board, you must look at the aircraft blueprints, then take a drill, reload battery, go to the aircraft, unscrew a plate (loss of energy in the drill)m carry the plate to a nearby palette, return to the aircraft, unscrew black box, walk around the aircraft, place the black box on a table, play a minigame of basically hitting the right [x,y] value to black box to replay a short record of the pilot speaking. Then you need to walk to the evidence area, pick up a bottle found at the crash site, walk across half the hanger to a paper box, pack it in, walk across the whole hangar, place the box into a post van that takes it out (to laboratory), walk across the hangar to the office again, read an email from technicians (you sent them email before to examine the black box data, I think). Then you go back to the aircraft, one by one pick pieces of the aircraft and screw them back to the airplane... there are several more steps taken, combination of walking, carrying stuff, sending/receiving emails and sticking another set of post-it notes only to get clear 3 answers:
- controls are OK
- bottle is irrelevant
- there are clear explosion mark on the aircraft
So basically the game makes the investigation for you and just let's you to pick the obvious answer, no thought process needed. The answer for why the aircraft (Cessna 172, if I'm not mistaken) was taken down by a bomb explosion (which apparently torn of the rudder flap and propeller)
So that is the tutorial - oversimplified, heavy on walking, doing basically manual work, exactly as said, but that's what tutorials do. Then goes the first real case and there comes the real problem...
It is exactly the same. You are at the area. First, you must pick up your backpack from the truck. Then use the drone... yeah, the drone - it wasn't simplified in the tutorial. Using the drone is literally just opening a tablet, clicking on getting a map, then animation of the unrealistically small-propelled drone self assembling and taking off from the truck and then you have map. That's half of the drone operation. Second one is looking for the wreckage. You click on the option, click on one of the four squares covering the whole map, the drone ones again takes off (you read right, it never landed) from the truck, and shows you marking of parts of the map. You have to do this 4 times. Then you just go by the map to all the points, finding the wreck - getting there is pain in the ass, you can jump, but you cannot get over 45cm high fence, so while being 10m from the wreck, you have to walk 30m around to get there. You pull out the markers and the game exactly shows you placeholders where to stick them.
It's worth mentioning that the pilot is dead. You know that from the briefing, he has been already taken care off by first responders, I think. But exactly as in the mock-up tutorial, upon you mark the area, a fire breaks out in the cockpit, so you need to put it out. Then you need to run around the area and mark all the evidence (all marked on the map, including some irrelevant stuff as the tutorial says, the drone pics up false positives - here it's a party tent, a shed in the woods etc.), then take out the camera, once again step exactly at spots marked by the game and make exactly the predetermined photos (you don't have the camera optics while not at the right spot and you cannot make a picture in different direction - trigger won't work)
I think that after that you are supposed to call the technicians to recover the wreckage but honestly I was so bored at that point that I just Alt-F4ed.
After this, my conclusions are that either the developers came with a good idea but failed to capture what would actually be interesting on it, or even had no idea how to do it or the game was more made to be a vessel to tell stories about the crashes rather then make the player investigate them. The gameplay rally feels more like the kids toy cube with different shaped holes and player must just place correct pieces to correct holes - good for visual novel, but for me, not reaching the minimum bar to be called a game.
Sad fact is that as an avid player of ARMA, I know what walking simulator means and this fit's the category more than anything I ever seen. The player literally does not need to use brain here and only serves as manual worker carrying stuff between predetermined points and clicking on prepared dialogs with no freedom of action or own agenda. Atop of that, ARMA 3, specifically Laws of War campaign has several missions using similar features and tone, showing that this game could be easily replicated and even made better just as a mission in 11 years old milsim.
My suggestion to the DEVs of this game would be somehow make it fast to a sequel and then build the game based on freedom of action, possibility of fail and letting the player to figure out what to do and to actually investigate a case on his own.
- taking pictures as he wants and giving him the actual pictures
- don't restrict or force actions
- focus on the important stuff, not the mundane walking and replacing battery in the drill
- make the drone actual feature, piloted UAV to manually investigate the scene instead of scripted event
- make a decision - is the investigator first on the scene? Include all the gore, CPR etc, including the fire extinguishing. Don't want to do that? Drop the extinguisher and looking for the wreck and fill the scene with first responders or evidence of their presence and don't trigger events like sudden fire on a crash site that was already secured by firefighters and/or police
- include NPCs at the crash site for interrogation
