Game Reviews

Piloteer

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iOS
| Piloteer
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Piloteer
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iOS
| Piloteer

I'm almost incomparably bad at Piloteer. But I'm pretty sure that that's the point. This is a tough, patently ridiculous jet pack simulator that's as much about the landings you don't make as the ones you do.

But then you'd expect nothing less than extreme difficulty from the dev behind Pivvot. But Piloteer takes things in a slightly different direction, or several different directions. And none of them is ever the direction you want to be heading in.

Crash landing

The game is all about piloting a jet pack. Tapping on the left of the screen fires you to the right, tapping on the right fires you to the left. Tapping both at the same time fires you upwards.

Well, ostensibly that's what they do. In practice it's far tougher than that sounds. You need to be gentle with your corrections, and more often than not your attempted flights will end with you mashing into the ground.

The meat of the experience is in career mode. Here you fly through a series of different levels, completing challenges as you go. These get increasingly tough as you go on, although they're pretty difficult to start off with.

You might need to do a backflip and land on a hotdog stand, or fly above the clouds and then land without shattering any of your bones. For every failure or flukey success, you can capture the replay to show to your friends.

It's that silliness that sets the game apart. It's produced with heart, and where your catastrophes could easily become frustrating, instead they're mostly just hilarious.

Spines aren't supposed to do that

Piloteer holds its strands together remarkably well. And when the controls finally start to click, and you feel like you're actually mastering its nuances, you'll play with a smile plastered over your face.

It might not be as immediate as Pivvot, but there's a whimsy to Piloteer that makes it impossible not to like. And you'll probably make up some impressive new swear words while you play too.

Piloteer

A bright and silly jetpack sim, Piloteer is a bit of an acquired taste, but once you get there, it's a lot of fun
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.