Welcome to our review of Aircraft Evolution, a small arcade-like aerial combat game out now on Nintendo Switch.
Aircraft Evolution is an action game, where you have the task of destroying enemy bases by bombarding them with your aircraft.
Fight through 4 time periods, from the era of the First World War to futuristic battles.
Level up and evolve your aircraft from a wooden plane to a futuristic fighter. Then, refine it by increasing its armor, fuel, speed, firepower, and much more. You upgrade as you go, but you can still try to take on a tank armed with plasma cannons using just a wooden plane!
40 different missions are waiting for you. You will be given different objectives: destroy an enemy base, deal with waves of attacking fighters, boss fights, and much more. Demolish the enemy with standard bombs, a barrage of cluster bombs, or burn enemies to ashes with napalm. Turn their bases into smoldering ruins and the battlefield into a scorched desert.
Bombs and explosions! More bombs and explosions!!!
On paper, it all sounds incredibly nice, a tempting fighter with planes, bombs and so much more. I would love to say it is just as nice as the PR talk makes it sound; but alas… This game experience for me, it runs so poorly and the steering was off more than once.
To give you an idea, the first level had to be played no less than four times before I managed to get through it. I kept missing the main target by a long shot and I never seemed to really have any fun with it, more like struggling with the controls and everything in the game.
Mechanically, the game starts off really slowly as you need to hold the A button in order to get some more momentum going and sure, while it is not bad to do the aerial dancing like loops and the likes, it just feels sluggish and that is not the way a game like this is supposed to be.
As you go to the higher levels, which I ended up showing real endurance for, it just does not cut it. I kept feeling the game fell short of anything called a decent experience and well, I never lied about disliking a game so I will not start now. I really did not have a lot of fun and most of the time, I was missing targets with my regular bomb, and yet, those mass destruction bombs did do all the needed damage.
I can not recount how many times I got shot down, not that it is hard to avoid bullets, just I gave up trying. I went in for a big attack on the main target and if I missed, I’d just feel hopeless and give up.
In conclusion, Aircraft Evolution is possibly a great game if you enjoy these smaller arcade-style fighters, but for me, it was more of a drag rather than something I enjoyed.
