DS GAME REVIEW
B-17 Fortress in the SkyBombs away |
Being part of a World War II bomber crew must have been a pretty thankless task. The best you could hope for was to make it back to base having, with the pull of a lever, killed a great many people who didn't know what was coming.
Still, this is the basis of great fiction. Let's face it, the years of World War II have spawned more video games than the whole imagined, alien-infested future of our species, and B17 Fortress in the Sky is set in one of its most fraught quarters. We know what you're thinking: it must be awesome.
Take a knee; we've got some bad news. Fortress in the Sky is one the most pointless games of the year. It's not all bad, true, and before we set about it with our critical staves, some of its more interesting features deserve a hearing.
First, there are the first-person shooting sequences set inside the plane. You don't have the opportunity to do any piloting, but you get to man all eight of the guns, switching from one to the other either by selecting them on a diagram of the plane on the touchscreen or, more commonly, by cycling through them with L and R shoulder buttons.
Then, there's the way the action is broken up into three sub-games reflecting what a B17 crew might have experienced on a mission: shooting at enemy planes, dodging puffs of flak from a top-down viewpoint, and dropping bombs from the perspective of the bomb sight.
The flak-dodging sections are painfully thin. All you're able to do is shift your weightless, papery aircraft randomly left and right while the flak explodes around you. The other two sections, however, show at least a glimmer of innovation.
The first time you play through a mission, you'll be carried along by the novelty of switching between guns and trying to aim at the German planes as they whizz past. The sounds effects help, too, in setting the atmosphere – as you dart from window to window, engines roar, guns clatter, and comrades yell inane but urgent things like, "Look alive, boys. That's the Third Reich down there!" (Thanks, Einstein.)
The problems begin on the second mission, and get worse from there. Having already bombed Rouen's rail yards, you take off for Brest to destroy some U-Boats. Once again, you start inside the plane, toggling from gun to gun and aiming at the fast-moving black smears that constitute enemy fighters as they dive down from the sky.
After exactly 40 seconds, your view shifts to steering your B17 languidly through the flak. Ten seconds later, you're at the guns again, and 30 seconds after that you're on a bombing run that lasts around 45 seconds, before returning for a final minute-long stint inside the plane.
Then, once that mission is over, you're doing the whole thing all again, even down to the timings. It's as if, having created the first mission, the team at Skyworks was so pleased with every aspect of its work that it decided to clone the level 24 times rather than risk deviating from the magical formula.
Of course, spending time with something that repetitive puts its flaws into sharp relief, and after time spent trapped in the predictable nature of Fortress in the Sky, you'll be rubbing your eyes in disbelief at the glaring impossibility of the utter incompetence of some of its elements.
In the fuselage, for instance, soldiers bark out clockface directions like, "Bogey at three o'clock!", but the cross-section of the plane gives no information to help you locate the enemy. As a result, you end up ignoring the prompts and opt for endless cycling through the guns until you see a dot in the sky.
Equally, in the bombing missions, you don't have a map or pointer to tell you where to drop your bombs. By looking at the touchscreen, you can get some idea of the vertical elevation to your targets, but horizontal positioning is guesswork. Essentially, if you're not within half a screen of the target when it creeps into view, you won't be able to hit it.
To overcome this, the game allows you to succeed in missions by completing ancillary tasks such as destroying AA guns and bridges. The same aiming problem applies to these, though, so to ensure that you make it through these sections, Fortress in the Sky gives you an infinite number of bombs with which to flatten the landscape, guaranteeing a qualified victory at the expense of authenticity and, more harmfully, a proper game.
So initially, there are some decent ideas, but whatever pleasure Fortress in the Sky provides is suffocated by the bewildering putrescence that surrounds it. Three minutes and ten seconds of fatally flawed gameplay, copied and pasted 24 times, just isn't worth your time.
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B17 Fortress in the Sky has one or two nice concepts but these are overwhelmed by mindless repetition
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