|| REVIEW || A Glider's Journey (PC)
Developed By : Emma Franklin & Charlie Marshall
Published By : Emma Franklin
Category : Indie, Flight, Simulation
Release Date : Sep 27, 2019
Flight simulation games have been around as long as games have been. Way back in the NES days they were a little tougher, navigating with a D-Pad to play games such as Top Gun (which is one of my earliest reviews and the game that made me want to start this blog). Then, when we got joysticks they became a bit easier, and while it's a genre that has expanded, it's one that I feel hasn't expanded enough.
A Glider's Journey is a recent entry in such category. It does away with the complications of a war-focused battle campaign, and instead aims to present you with a light and beautiful experience piloting your glider. Spread across fifteen levels, you'll need to pilot your glider through a series of rings to a landing platform at the end.
The trick with the levels is that you absolutely need to fly through every ring on the level before reaching the platform. While it's possible to reach the end on some of the levels without doing this (and the first time you reach it this way you'll get an achievement), you'll know if you've missed any by the color on the platform. Green will mean you're ready for a landing and red means you've arrived too early.
While navigating through the levels, there will be plenty of obstacles depending on where you are. Some levels will have you outdoors, skirting above the water, weaving between and around trees. Some will have you diving into underground cave systems, and some will even make you fly through rings within rings.
The only rings you'll need to worry about are the golden ones with arrows inside of them. These arrows serve a couple of purposes. The first being that they indicate the direction you'll need to head for the next ring. In addition to this, you'll notice that the rings come in two colors : blue or green. The only difference between these is the amount of power each provides to your glider's thruster by passing through the ring, with green being the more powerful.
Like I said before, the goal in A Glider's Journey is to provide you with a short experience, one that takes you to scenic places and challenges your ability to guide your aircraft through the rings. And it's certainly a challenge that works. Each level will get increasingly more difficult, forcing you to simply zig-zag through some trees at first, while later introducing complicated chains of loops and corkscrews.
Controlling the glider can be done in three ways. You can use the WASD keys on your keyboard, you can use the mouse, or you can use the joysticks of a connected controller. I personally tested out all three, and I found myself favoring the mouse more than anything. For my mouse, I can manually adjust the DPI on the fly, so it was easy to put this down to the dullest setting and allow for the most minute flight adjustments. If you're unable to use such a feature, I definitely recommend using a controller because the WASD keys adjust your pitch and wing angle in chunks and it can be hard to readjust.
For the most part, this game is a lot of fun. It definitely fit's into the category of "easy to pick up, hard to master". By the time you complete one stage, you'll think you're ready to take on a whole slew of levels. Then you'll hit the next level and be put back in your place. However, all of this won't matter once you hit about 2/3 of the way into the game. You'll encounter a level which will quite literally make or break most players. It's a level that has lines of concentric circles, rotating in opposing directions. I didn't even make it to this level, I merely saw a very short 3 or 4 second clip of it, and I felt instantly dizzy.
So as a final verdict on this game, I'd have to say it's entirely based on how you can handle such a situation as the level I just described. If you easily succumb to these sort of things, this certainly won't be a game for you. Like I said, I only watched a clip initially, I wasn't even playing the game myself the first time I saw the level. However, if you think you can mentally fight off this sensation and barrel through such a level, then by all means this is a game you will love and enjoy.
For me personally, I have to knock the score a bit because of that level. I do want to say that outside of that level I highly enjoyed A Glider's Journey, and if I could avoid that level all together this is easily a game I could see myself playing non-stop. I've always loved flight games, even moreso ones with a good challenge, I just wish I could speak differently about that Spiral level as I have come to call it.
Game Score : 6 / 10
Pick up the game HERE on Steam
Game Played on PC (Steam)
A Code for the game was graciously
provided to the blog for review
