Take Off – The Flight Simulator Review

Take Off may have a fairly oblivious sub-title, but oddly enough, it doesn’t take itself quite as seriously as you might think. At least, not when compared to something like Microsoft’s flight simulators; as this one is more geared towards the arcade-like approach, but only to some degree.

As you can probably tell from the general title of the game, this game is based around flying. The controls for the game are pretty easy to get to grips with, as the game is quite arcadey in most regards. A lot of the time you can get away with basically turning left or right to steer the plane, along with holding up or down on the thrust to keep your plane at a steady level or to slow down somewhat, just in case you might need to land for one reason or another.

Speaking of landing; as well as the arcade nature of the game, there are a number of missions for you to enjoy, with each level requiring you to complete a subset of objectives for you to acquire some in-game cash. That cash can be used to either purchase newer, faster, and just generally better planes. On top of all of that, you can also purchase general upgrades, all of which can be used to make it faster and everything else that has been previously mentioned. So, if your flying machine is just a touch too slow for you, then feel free to put your dosh into it to improve whatever you might see as lacking.

While the title has “Flight Simulator” in its name, its flight sim tendencies are kept under wraps a lot of the time. There are a number of stats that get messed with when you play - such as throttle, altitude, and whether to have landing gear up or down - but that’s about as far as it goes. It does just enough to keep the flight simulator nature of the genre, without being too dull for the more casual audiences, ones that you’re more likely to find on a mobile device; at least in regards to this genre.

In a game such of this, the tutorial is what you could consider as pretty key and important; of which it was. The tutorial managed to teach me everything I needed to do, without any real issues cropping as I did, whilst teaching me the mechanics that the game has employed inside it. However, the one problem with the tutorial that I found was the fact that it has to be completed all in one sitting; something that is a touch irritating. For the majority of players, I can’t imagine prematurely leaving the game before you’ve completed the tutorial will be much of a problem, but when I exited out of the game, before I had finished the tutorial and came back to the game; only to find out I had to do it all over again was quite annoying, to say the least. Thankfully, the saving grace for this is that you can simply skip the tutorial at your leisure, an added feature I was quite pleased to discover.

In terms of graphics, flight simulators or flying games tend to be a touch hit and miss compared to others; with Take Off fitting somewhere in the middle. When it comes to the models of the planes themselves, they do have a finite of detail applied to them to add to the whole experience, with even the flaps that are designed to slow down your plane move along with it; exactly how you might expect. On the flipside, however, the maps you fly around, even the buildings themselves don’t look all that detailed or interesting. For example, the land you fly above looks like something you might find if you spent a few minutes in Unity, messing with the terrain tool. The terrain itself doesn’t impress all that much, now which does need to be said.

Another addition to things that could be construed as a little minor, but a tad annoying nonetheless involves what happens when you die. On the second mission, you’re tasked with trying to land your plane, and I was making my way down to the runway; slowed down just enough to go in for the landing and soon enough my wheels hit the ground. Unfortunately, I came in just a little too fast, my plane bounced a little bit, and the split-second the back of my plane tapped the floor, it exploded into a million pieces. I don’t have an issue with how quickly your plane explodes; it’s more to do with the fact that it happened almost the exact second something other than my wheels hit the ground.

Overall, Take Off – The Flight Simulator is a fun experience all-in-all. Visually it isn’t the greatest looking flight sim you’ll see out today, but it does a good job of its own aesthetics for the most part; not to mention some of the lovely camera angles you can fly at. Environment a lot of the time isn’t what I would consider all that interesting and puts a fair detriment on the game to some degree. Honestly, though, for the most part, this could easily be considered one of the best flying games on iOS.