Hands on with Paper Planes

The thing about games is, they're not just collections of objects in boxes or sets of rules written down. As anybody who has ever tried to throw a ball of paper into a bin in the presence of a man has discovered, a game can emerge from nowhere, rapidly develop into a strictly stewarded competition on which life and death rests, and then disappear again afterwards, as though it were merely an interesting belch.

Namco Bandai's Paper Planes is the video game equivalent of one of these games. In it, you have to make paper aeroplanes that fly in a range of different ways, doing loop-the-loops, gliding over long distances, and curving up to a pointed apex before dipping and curving back down to earth.

After a brief tutorial, which you can revisit whenever you like, and during which you learn the very basics of how your plane is affected by the weight of the paper, the angle of the elevator, the shape of the model itself, and the external effects of wind and rain, you have three choices of how to proceed: New World Tour, Challenge, and Free Flight.

The latter, of course, allows you to fiddle with your models to hone your skills, while the two former modes present you with a series of specific goals to achieve, such as making your plane fly 300 feet, steering it through a series of hoops, or looping it back over your head. In New World Tour, you work your way through an impressive number of tasks across the backdrops of Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia, and America, while Challenge just picks a couple of these tasks at random and throws you in.

From what we've seen, it's looking great. The screenshots probably don't convey it very well, but the graphics are spare and colourful, with a 3D cel-shaded look, smooth animation, and plenty of incidental detail, like falling leaves and cart-wheeling acrobats silhouetted against the background. We particularly like the crash test dummy avatar.

Of course, all that really matters are the physics of the actual plane-throwing, and these seem perfectly sound. The number of plane models and paper gauges seems fairly limited to us, but then again the elevation scale has more than 250 increments. We're not mathematicians, but off the tops of our heads that adds up to a ship load of unique – albeit not necessarily very different – combinations.

We'll see. Paper Planes is definitely a novel idea, and impeccably put together, so there's every chance it'll be a winner. Click 'Track it!' to find out how far it flies.