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The best part about Bomber Crew is naming all of your characters after your friends and family and trying to prevent them from getting swiss cheese’d out of the sky. 3/5
On my scale, a 3/5 game is good. It is satisfying, fun, and otherwise worth the purchase price, with some caveats.
The premise of Bomber Crew is quite simple: you are a squadron commander deployed to the aerial front lines of World War II. You are in charge of a bunch of fresh recruits, and your goal is to have them contribute to the war effort without turning into a casualty of war. Unfortunately for your squadron, RAF command hates your guts and is committed to sending your crew on solo missions deep into enemy lines. Why? For the “Hehe XD” I guess.
So you gear up your crew of recruits, outfit your bomber, and send them off to attempt their mission.
Bomber Crew looks and sounds cute, but it’s absolutely positively NOT a cute game. It is a game that does a surprisingly good job of emulating the demands of wartime piloting alongside the distress of sending people (in this case meeples) and machinery (a customized plane) you care about to their potential deaths. Just like in Saving Private Ryan (and wartime in general), the mission objective comes first, and your survival is secondary.
The game is complicated, with a ton of moving parts. You have to balance altitude, heading, the positioning AND actions of each crew member, and the gunners’ targets, while maintaining a line of sight to your objective (and potential bonus objectives). Part of the issue with the game is that the demands on the player are intense, and it somewhat clashes with the cutesy style of the game. A lot of people might be misled by this and buy it expecting something a little more chill. Don’t be fooled: this game is intense, and you should get it if that’s what you want. If you want something more laid back, look elsewhere.
Personally, I think its cute style and bright colorful animation gives it a lot of charm and allows it to (unintentionally) provide a much more sophisticated commentary on the demands and consequences of war. Just like the artistry of Studio Ghibli films, the bright saturated colors and cartoony graphics allows you to peer into the horrors of conflict without being bogged down in the intensity and viscerality of violence. Every time a crew member dies, you mourn the loss of a veteran soldier who has left a hole in your crew and your heart. You see their name added to the “Lost in Combat” Memorial, which suddenly puts into perspective all of the WWII memorials globally with little names etched into their surface. When your plane gets gunned down and goes down in flames, you are powerless to save the machine and it’s members from certain doom. And when you get ready to go on the next mission, your heart pounds with the exhilaration of anticipation, fear and excitement. War is horrible, visceral, stressful, and engrossing even in the bright colors of a whimsical cartoony video game. It’s not hard to believe how so many people return from war scarred by the horrors they have seen or scarred by the loss of those they care about in service of an outcome. Now imagine you experience those horrors and you lose the war, rendering it all for naught. All the loss, pain, trauma just to live with the guilt and shame of meaninglessness. Ach, heartbreaking.
This, I think, impacts the game negatively in that any losses you incur in the line of duty cripple your ability to complete the later missions. Because the RAF is operating on a shoe-string budget, the loss of an upgraded plane often means duct taping a replacement together, with few (if any) of the upgrades of your previous plane. Likewise, your losses to your crew effectively kneecap your everyone else, since you ALWAYS recruit people significantly lower level than the member you lost. Your level 10 medic just so happened to somehow fall out of the plane? Now everyone else gets to suffer as a level 4 nooblet medic has to take their place.
The brutality of war makes this game brutal and unfun to play at times. If you mess up once, you can enter a death spiral from which there is likely no recovery. If you lose your entire crew on the second to last mission of the campaign, you might as well pack it up since there is no way a crew of fresh recruits in a base configuration plane are completing the final gauntlet. This is a huge problem, as you then lose and have to restart the entire campaign, which can take hours.
There should be a way to have your crew develop some basic AI to do certain things if they’re not actively assigned to a job as they rank up, just to take some of the strain off the player. Likewise, the game should be a little more generous with replacement crew experience levels and money for upgrades.
That said, I had some amazing moments playing this game. Doing a barrel roll while my engineer (named after one of my best friends) was repairing the wing was… unwise. I once dove the plane to dodge in a dogfight right after a bombing run and didn’t pull up in time. That was ok though, because the plane has some really hilarious ragdoll physics when it crashes.
I think this is a good game on sale.