Nintendo DS
B-17: Fortress in the Sky
| Graphics: Sound: Gameplay: Overall: |
5.33 5.00 5.00 4.33 |
| Votes: | 3 |
| Reviews: | 1 |
Rate this game
Review this game
| Reviewer: Skan | Date: Jul 31, 2025 |
| Alright, first on the chopping block, B-17 Fortress in the Sky. This is a bit of a casual review, since I only played one mission, but I didn't really enjoy this much - thus I didn't feel like playing more than one mission.
B-17 Fortress in the Sky is a WWII fighter plane simulator where you take turns going through different gameplay modes - from shooting at enemy planes to dodging turret fire to shooting more enemy planes to dropping bombs on enemy targets to shooting more enemy planes. There's a lot of shooting. Graphics: 6 The graphics were about what you'd expect from a WWII-era game. Er, not that the game looks like it was made in the 40s - I mean it captures the style decently. I've never been a fan of this kind of artstyle, but it's definitely got its place and B-17 does it decently. The gun combat sections are rendered in 3D which is cool, and the texturing isn't bad. The other sections look almost Mode 7-ish, which isn't a bad look for sure. However, the bombing targets definitely do not stand out well enough against the background. Sound: 6 I mean... it's WWII-era airplane sounds. It's pretty hard to mess that up. The sounds of these airplanes and their gunfire has been so ingrained into our collective psyche that it probably took them less than an hour to get all the sound effects. The music, when it does play, isn't too much to write home about, but it's also not necessarily bad, either. You'll also hear your crewmates call out where to fire in the gun combat sections, and these are... ALMOST helpful, but not quite. Gameplay: 3 Sweet Churchill's double-chin did they take a neat idea and completely botch it! So, these gun combat sections, right? The parts where you shoot at enemy planes? You have to swap between different crew members, each with different points of view, to properly hit the enemy planes. Sounds cool, right? Makes you feel like you're part of a whole team. The problem is that the icons to switch between crew members is a side view, which is COMPLETELY unhelpful when trying to assess your surroundings! You can tell where your 12-o-clock and your 6-o-clock (in front of you and behind you respectively) are easily, but anything else? Your left and your right? Good luck idiot, they're all jumbled together. Supposedly playing on Novice will cause your view to automatically shift to the correct one, but I'm almost certain I played on Novice, and that didn't happen for me. Maybe I'm wrong, I dunno. I swear, aiming the guns was a crapshoot too. Maybe with a more accurate control scheme - the touch screen might have worked well - it would have been more fun, but the D-pad is just too jittery for my liking. The sections where you have to dodge enemy bullets is pretty annoying as well. I always feel like my plane is too bulky to dodge anything. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but it's not the most fun. Oh, and then there's there's the bombing section, which far as I can tell, is the only section that decides whether you succeed the mission or not - and it's not at the end, so you can't see whether you won until you survive the rest of the mission. This section is so stupid. You have to move your plane up and down in order to make your bomb drops accurate - alright - but you also have to move left and right to the target - alright. The problem is that the game doesn't tell you where exactly the targets are, and you are constantly moving forward - so if you pass one, tough luck. It is nearly impossible to know where the targets are beforehand, so beating this section essentially just involves a bunch of trial and error of finding the target and bombing it. Also, remember back in the graphics section when I said the targets blend into the background too much? Mentally copy-paste that into this section. Overall: 4 Maybe good if you're a huge WWII airplane buff, or like simulation games, but I don't think many capital G Gamers will get a lot out of this. It's definitely got some promising ideas, but fumbles the execution. Fortress in the Sky would be a killer name for a science fantasy JRPG though. Also, I mostly did this because I've got this massive list of games that I've somehow gotten, and I wanna go through and trim the fat so to speak. Thought it'd be fun to write a review for them so I can tell my future self why I did or didn't keep the game. This game's definitely not being kept haha. |
|