“The airplanes slowly taxied to the beginning of the runway, humbly and calmly with flaps down, bowing with deference to the infinite sky.”
-Ross Victory
Anyone who has read my reviews on here will probably know that I don’t really do indie games. I have nothing against them, don’t get me wrong, I just can never get into the bloody things, preferring instead my beloved story-heavy mid to big-budget games and the occasional retro classic. But, as I type this, I confess that one of these indie darlings has flown over my attention. Opened the bomb bay doors and dropped several hundred kiloton explosions onto it! Okay, so the metaphor is a tad strained here, but bear with me. I speak of 2017’s Bomber Crew, developed by Runner Duck and published by Curve.
Bomber Crew is a (mostly) procedurally-generated game, much in the vein of something like X-COM, in which you look over an RAF Lancaster bomber and its crew as it flies mission after mission against the amassed forces of the Third Reich during the Second World War.
Completing missions gets you money and experience points to upgrade your aircraft and crew’s gear, but if any crew should fall then they must be replaced with rookies and, should your plane go down over enemy territory or the English Channel, well you may just lose it all!
Let’s launch a daring raid on the 8-bit review, shall we?
The 8-Bit Review
Visuals: 9/10
Bomber Crew is a pretty looking game, that’s for sure. Instead of going down the road of realistic graphics, Runner Duck has instead opted for a very bold and basic cartoon-like aesthetic. Whilst the aircraft look like the real deal, the crew all look a bit like Pop launched a military airman range, with big heads, short limbs, and a sort of cutesy look, which somehow still works even when they’re laying down fire on attacking Meschersmitts or lying on the ground and bleeding out.
My squad, immortalised!
Yes, it’s a testament to the visual designers that, despite the horrors of war, the fun cartoony style still holds and these two elements actually don’t clash with each other in any way. It also helps that a simple graphical style keeps the game moving smoothly with no dropped frames, considering that there’s always so much going on in any one mission. The terrain of Southern England and Northwest Europe is rendered simply, mostly green fields with the occasional forest and simple, cartoon-like city to represent the likes of Bruges, London, and Frankfurt.
You’ll be seeing German installations much more closely, namely through the bombsights as you like them up to drop some hot, incendiary death. Airfields, ammo dumps, bunkers, and even dams are styled simply but, at the same time, are easily recognizable.
Destruction effects on the bomber are fantastic too. Stricken engines trail thick black smoke and flames, machine-gunned hull panels show the clouds whipping by outside and compromised fuel tanks spew aviation fuel into the open sky.
But, if your plane makes it home, your home airfield always looks very welcoming. Especially the crew barracks, that place looks very cozy after dicing with death over Caen!
Simple yet incredibly effective, Bomber Crew‘s basic, cartoon-visual aesthetic makes it not only stand out but even perform well on the Switch, my console of choice for this one.
Audio: 8/10
What kind of audio would one expect to accompany a flying death machine’s story across the cloudy skies of Europe, the massed forces of the Reich on them all the while?
Machine guns ripping away at all angles, the plink plink of rounds slamming through the hull, tortured engine squeals as they are stricken and malfunction. What about the pok pok of deadly flak bursts all around you? The eerie scream of falling bombs followed by the epic boom of an enemy installation biting the dust…
It’s all there, I am pleased to say, stitching together to create a blanket of immersion into World War II. It also accompanied by something of a dynamic soundtrack, remaining relatively quiet in the background whilst your Lancaster moves from runway to target, only to flare into a big orchestral score when the Luftwaffe move in for the kill or when you approach your unsuspecting target. Though relatively forgettable in and of itself, the music is surely a welcome accompaniment to when you land your stricken bomber back on its airfield in the English countryside, like a noisy yet pleasant friend welcoming you home.
Bomber Crew even has voice acting, though not in any language you may know. Instead, the game employs Sims-like gibberish for all characters. This includes mission command, friendly pilots, and enemy Aces, whose gibberish is edged with a Hollywood German accent that makes their dialogue both hilarious and somehow still dripping with malice, even without reading the accompanying text!
This game has excellent audio, from roaring machine guns to zany German Aces, but a forgettable soundtrack does let it down slightly.
Gameplay: 10/10
An RNG game like Bomber Crew will live or die on the strength of its gameplay loop. It’s why X-COM is so highly regarded. I am glad to say that this World War II adventure is up there with the vaunted alien blaster. The gameplay loop of Bomber Crew is super simple. Select a mission, take off, fly to your target, bomb them into dust, and then bug out of there back to England. Simple right?
Well, yes and no. There are a lot of factors that need constant monitoring and juggling if your crew are to have long lives and have talking head sections in future documentaries.
Each element of getting the mission done and making it home is divided up among your crew members themselves. Your pilot obviously flies the plane, he keeps it in the air and chooses what height to fly at (low gives the best visibility, most accurate bombing range but also renders your plane a massive target, mid-range protects from flak but reduces visibility and high altitude causes the team to slowly run out of oxygen and freeze, it’s a real game of strategy).
Radiomen (and women) keep you in touch with command and are able to deploy some excellent perks like auto-tagging enemy fighters and calling in friendly Spitfires, radar crew call out waypoints to be followed and let you know about enemy fighters in the area, the engineer keeps an eye on the fuel gauges and puts out engine fires, you have a bomb specialist to actually deliver the goods and, of course, some dedicated gunners, there to see off the Meschersmitts and Focke Wulfs with a wall of machine-gun bullets.
And if that’s not all, you can even train your crew in a secondary discipline, which is definitely recommended as there will be times when the crew is too wounded to man their posts (or even straight-up dead) and you find your radioman having to climb out onto the wing to repair an engine, or your radar operator picking up the fire extinguisher to fight back an inferno in the tail section. You will also find crew with very specialist jobs, such as bomber or engineer, will more often than not be running between their stations and spare machine gun ports in the nose and underbelly of the aircraft. It’s all about clever micromanagement if you want the crew to make it home safely.
Thankfully, the bomber does have an ammo stockpile and first aid station, so those machine guns will keep on firing (apart from when the crew is running for more bullets), and injured crew members can take a lie down for a few minutes to recover their HP. The bomber also has systems such as electronics and hydraulics, which you will definitely be taking for granted until they’re out of action, depriving you of radar, radio, rotatable gun turrets, and even landing gear, in extreme situations. The plane can also, as mentioned just now, set on fire, so making sure that you dot extinguishers around the aircraft is essential.
With the odds so against your poor crew, it’s a mercy that their gear is, in fact upgradable. Flak jackets, thermal gloves, life jackets for ocean survival, helmets and oxygen tanks, there’s a lot of useful gear that you can strap to your crewmen to keep them fighting through to 1945. The bomber itself is also highly upgradeable, with the experience points earned on missions unlocking thicker armour, bigger engines, more improved electronics and hydraulics and, best of all, bigger and more numerous guns with which to beat down the massed forces of the Luftwaffe. If your crew are unfortunate enough to have to bail over the sea or enemy territory, then you can even take along a dinghy and messenger pigeon to increase their chances of getting home safely.
Your crew also level up, earning abilities and perks based on their role. For instance, a pilot may learn how to emergency dive at a certain level, or a gunner learn the “focus” ability, allowing them to more accurately shoot down attacking fighters.
And you’ll be seeing a lot of attacking fighters, let me tell you, facing both regular single prop planes and more hardy dual engined aircraft, which try to sneak underneath your bomber and gut it from below (having that ventral turret installed is essential when these begin to show up). Some planes are even crewed by enemy Aces, highly talented German airmen who are hell-bent on sending you groundwards. Some of these characters are armed with special weapons, such as incendiary rounds, and take a deal of damage before going down, but dropping them will earn you huge cash bonuses, so it’s worth weighing up those risks before you turn tail for Blighty.
So, that’s all of the minutiae, what about the overarching gameplay? Well, the game is split into campaigns, which have one story mission (usually an actual event from the war) and as many accompanying RNG side missions as you like, split into easy, medium, and hard difficulty with rewards to match.
Most missions involve raining fire down on various Nazi installations, though on odd occasions you may be air-dropping survival gear to downed pilots bobbing around in the Channel or weapons caches to French resistance cells deep in enemy territory. You even, on one mission, get to stuff a hydro-electric dam with one of Barnes-Wallace’s famous bouncing bombs! Each story mission you complete advances you to a different point in the war introduces new missions and dangers, and brings your crew one step closer to victory (and survival!).
Yes, there’s an absolute ton of things to do in Bomber Crew, making for intense, varied, and simple-to-pick-up gameplay that makes it ideal for the Nintendo Switch when used as a handheld.
Narrative: 7/10
If you don’t know much about the Royal Air Force’s bombing campaign against Nazi Germany during the war then… playing Bomber Crew won’t be of any help in educating you! You control little Commonwealth personnel who fly a bomber, nipping across to the European mainland to blow the tar out of Jerry and all of that.
But there’s more to this game’s story than just tally go, chocks away and bully good show, for Bomber Crew‘s best stories are the ones you make yourself. What do I mean by that little pearl of wisdom? Well, let me give you an example…
It was a mission like any other. Take off from the airfield near London, cross the channel, head across France and Belgium, and into German territory, in order to drop explosive death upon an ammunition dump.
Except for this time, things were going against my poor crew. There seemed to be many more fighters up than usual and the enemy flak was intense, but despite the danger, my Lancaster made it onto the target and got the job done.
The real danger was the return home. For, whilst fighting off droves of fighters (which had already knocked an engine out of action and pierced the right-hand fuel tank, as well as injuring several crewmen and almost starting a fire), my crew were met by a particularly cunning enemy Ace, in a heavily armoured twin-prop fighter. This demon parked his fighter directly behind mine and proceeded to rake the inside of my aircraft, gunning down my poor tail gunner in the process and damaging several systems!
Somehow, against all odds, my bomber managed to defeat the Ace, sending his plane crashing down onto a beach near Dunkirk even as my engineer was fighting two engine fires and one of the other gunners was saving the life of my gunner.
But the real drama came once back over England, for one of the landing wheels would not retract, critically damaged during the dogfighting. Even worse, the bomb bay was still full of bombs (I’m a frugal bomber), so there was a good chance my beloved plane would explode upon its hobbled landing.
My beautiful bomber!
And so, as the lights of the airfield approached and we began our potentially dicey descent, I ordered all but my brave pilot to bail out, watching with intense nerves as they each grabbed a parachute and disappeared into the night, leaving my brave pilot to face his fate.
The plane went lower, lower, reached the runway, touched down its remaining wheel, and proceeded to crash to the ground, skidding wildly down the runway as two of the remaining engines and the surviving wheel sheared off with the impact. Somehow, as if by a miracle… the bombs stayed dormant!
And so my bomber was repaired, the crew easily found their way back to the airfield and were ready to fight for another day!
See, you couldn’t write this stuff!
Challenge: 8/10
Challenge is always difficult to quantify in games like this, but I’d have to say that the best way to describe the difficulty of Bomber Crew is “balanced”.
See, there are different routes through the campaign that suits your play style. You can play it relatively safe, taking on a ton of easy missions to build up the wedge required to upgrade your plane and crew, or you can take on more challenging missions, with much greater risks, to upgrade much faster.
This will come to a head when you take on the story missions, however. These are nearly always a challenge and will need strong micromanagement skills to get the job done and the crew back home again.
Difficulty during missions can be pleasantly varied too, though never to the point where easy missions turn out too difficult or vice versa. On some medium or hard missions, you may find an increased amount of flak, enemy fighters, and radar in your path than usual, and the odd easy missions may have an Ace show up just to spice things up a little.
Overall, an adaptable but quite versatile difficulty system makes Bomber Crew easy to play, and a pleasure to master.
Accessibility: 10/10
For a game with so many systems and layers to learn, it’s incredibly easy to get into.
The game explains it’s concepts well and breaks the player in gently, plus you can take as many easy missions as you like off the bat in order to get used to the mechanics.
Sure, you might lose some crew members early on due to lack of equipment (I know I did) but hey, the loss will help you learn!
Uniqueness: 10/10
Whilst Bomber Crew is definitely in the same stable as games like X-COM, it’s still very much its own beast. A beast I’ve never seen anything like before.
I’m not even being hyperbolic here, in my twenty-something years of gaming I’ve seen nothing like this game. The rogue-like elements, the crew management, the juggling of different jobs, it all adds up to a fantastically unique experience in which you will have to get used to wearing a lot of different hats.
Home, safe and sound!
Runner Duck should be very proud of themselves for creating such a wonderfully niche title.
Personal: 9/10
From the moment I spent a whopping £2.99 on this game in the eShop, it has continually kept me gripped. It’s basic yet stylish graphics, solid audio, pick-up-and-play gameplay with plenty of nuance and tons of upgrade and customization options to keep you entertained, Bomber Crew is a game I can definitely recommend to anyone.
The fact that it’s also surprisingly accessible adds extra value for me, with plenty of easy missions to get stuck in to. Indeed, the only thing that even slightly disappointed me was the weak narrative, though this was somewhat assuaged by the way the game allows you to build your own stories through the adventures the world throws at you.
Considering how cheap this title tends to go for these days, you would be criminal not to pick it up, especially if you like games like X-COM. Tally Ho and Toodle Pip folks!
Aggregated Score: 8.8
Winst0lf is a blogger, reviewer and podcaster who began his internet journey thanks to the lovely people on this site. You can find his blog here, and his podcast, Shart Select, here. Every time you read one of his articles, he lets out a little cheer!
