Quick Review: SimplePlanes

Yeah, I’m not starting a career as a pilot anytime soon.

This looks pretty decent. Now I can just
mirror this on the opposite side...

Jundroo, LLC released SimplePlanes to Steam on December 17th, 2015. It’s a physics game in which you can construct a plane, piece by piece, and then test it out in a flight simulation. You have a very wide variety of possibilities in constructing your plane, with all kinds of parts. Of course, you always have to have the basics: One cockpit, two wings, landing gear at the front and back, stabilizers and some form of propulsion (blades or reactors). Experiment with shapes, build your plane like you would a LEGO model (or go crazy and stick anything, anywhere, to see what works).

Aaaaaaand... takeoff! Yeah, I doubt
I'll build a plane better than this one.

After which, take to the skies! Spin the blades with the left Shift key, take off with S, and then control your plane in the air with WASD. Are the plane physics in flight accurate to real life? I don’t know nearly enough in that field to tell. But I feel the game tries to be as close to reality as possible. A tutorial exists to show you how to design a plane and how to control it in the air afterwards, but even with that it can take a while to learn to use the controls.

One issue in the game is that you learn to take
off and land, but aren't taught the mechanics
of flight too well. You have to try and figure
them out on your own.

A fighter jet for a simple island race?
There's no kill like overkill.

So – you’ve built your air vehicle? You’ve learned to pilot it? You’ve been through all the exercises? You made the necessary adjustments? On to the game proper, then – in which you can take part in races and try to beat CPUs to the finish line. That’s still not enough? Time for the big guns. Literally – you can equip your plane with weapons and learn to use them, and have a set of missions associated with this, including a mode to partake in a dogfight. Still not enough? Try one of a couple of challenges, which may require out-of-the-box thinking in order to complete.

There’s more: You can download plane models off of the game’s website, including many that are similar to real life planes. The plane-building part is accompanied by a sandbox world that you can freely visit, and in which you can even discover distant lands. Finally, the game has a small modding community through the Steam Workshop.

That's an awesome-looking jet.
I would never be able to build that.

By the looks of it, I'm also not great at piloting.
(For the record - I crash into the mountains
10 seconds later.)

From the original sound of it, I thought this game would include only the plane design and test parts of the simulator, which would already be pretty cool (if short) on its own. The inclusion of races, combat and challenges was a great surprise, not to mention the sandbox world. Much of the game involves learning to build planes to make them as aerodynamic as possible, and while I mentioned LEGOs earlier, it’s much more complicated than that. I doubt I’d have the level of knowledge in physics and engineering to properly build an aerodynamic vehicle and then improve it after a few tests, but it's still a fascinating process to experience. Just add some peer review and you’ve got genuine scientific process here!

There’s a lot to try out here, so that could be a very interesting game to test. That said, if you’re not physics-inclined (or if you can’t pilot worth a damn without crashing – seriously, I make Launchpad McQuack look like a God of landing safely in comparison), you might not spend a lot of time with it.

Simple Planes is available on Steam for 12.99$.