When I see flight in non-vehicular flying in games, I can’t help but think back to the heady days of Superman 64, what a disaster that was and a lesson in how not to do it. So it was a pleasant surprise when I happened upon a little indie gem called Superflight. A game featuring a little wooden person flying through colourful maps in-between different floating rock formations to achieve the highest score possible. As of writing it is currently sitting at a mere £2.06 on the Steam store so for the price of a coffee it’s hard not to recommend checking this out.
Since it’s an indie game, it’s not graphically demanding so should run on all but the most basic PC’s / laptops and with the minimalist style of the game I didn’t encounter any performance issues, bugs or crashes during my time with it.
The game is best experienced on a controller as it is more intuitive controlling with the analogue stick.
I’d also recommend a wearing a set of headphones while playing this game. There’s no music to speak of, rather it focuses on purely immersing you in the joy of flight, with the wind effects reminiscent of a stormy night listened to from indoors and building in intensity as you fly ever more dangerously near to the rock formations.
The controls are incredibly simple, all you need is the left analogue stick and one face button and you’re ready to fly. Flying itself feels responsive and weighty, it does a great job of building up a sense of speed. For instance when nosediving near one of the many floating rock formations the screen begins to shake, the wind gets louder as the score wrack’s up along with multipliers and “awesome” bonuses on the screen near enough to your little flier so you can see it without it drawing your focus away from the action which could lead to a wipe-out.
Which is easy to do at top speed but given how quickly you can reset, always restarting at the same point so you can get used to where you are and have been.
Thankfully the reset is immediate with it being set to just one face button so the “just one more go” factor is front and centre. This helps with getting to grips with the game quickly and with no penalty or lengthy reset time to reload it encourages more dangerous flights to see how much of a score you can get from flying through that little gap, even if it does take two or three tries but as soon as you do make it through the tiny gap alive its hard not to smile.
Once you’ve gotten used to the game you’ll find yourself skirting rock walls and making ever more perilous flights to keep your combo going.
Since this is more of a arcade style game with the goal being to see how big of a score you can get, it’s clear this isn’t a game that’s likely to be played for hours on end as the repetitiveness can start to grate after so many tries in one session so it’ll vary from person to person how long they stay with the game. If you’re a competitive person your High Score and Best Combo are recorded and displayed on the pause menu along with your world-wide rank as # and number.
To keep you interested while you’re building up those scores, the game features an endless selection of procedurally generated maps, which can be changed by either flying through the popping purple portals scattered throughout the map or by simply flying straight down to the bottom of the map, being greeted by a white foggy screen and resetting you on a new map.
If you find a map you enjoy flying around in or just like the look of there’s the option to save it and come back to it later. With every map being a randomised diverse set of colours and formations its a constant point of interest of what’s waiting for you on the other side of that portal.
For all the positives, there are a few flaws, there’s not a great deal of content here, obviously being an indie arcade game it doesn’t have branching quest paths, multiple choice dialogue options or voice acted cut-scenes and if you aren’t chasing worldwide score ranks or have started to find it a little repetitive unfortunately there isn’t much to keep you coming back. But for the low price and the hours of unadulterated fun it offers, its hard to pass up.
Superflight earns an easy recommendation from me.
