Air Brawl Reviews

The twitch shooter of dog fighting games. Everything about this game, from the controls to the gunplay is extremely tight and satisfying. There is no better feeling than taking out two guys with a DMR then avoided a tailing plane by traversing the map. Then immediately crashing.

More people need to play this game. Seriously. The controls are unbelievably tight and responsive, but not so tight that you'd find them twitchy. I've played a bunch of other flight games and this one has the controls of a AAA title, not an indie effort. The aircraft and weapons are all very novel in design and execution. That said, the aircraft all fly largely in the same way, so no class is at a disadvantage. The community is almost non-existent, though. Which is a shame... because it's a really fun game.

Had this game in alpha, pre-release on steam, and this review is about an hour after steam release. This game was already well worth the money in pre-release, before most of the features you see in this release even existed. The basic concept is brilliant. It's a dogfighting game based on a tight control set and unique ship and weapon types. The ships respond to the slightest touch of the mouse, requiring skill, but don't spin out or drag like many other air combat games. That means the game is really arcadey. The weapons are completely unique, and I can only recommend you play the game or look at the videos or wiki to find out more. Here's a sample: the hammer (a comic style hammer that comes off the top of your plane and 'boinks' other planes); the sniper (yes, a sniper with a scope on a plane); the gravity bomb (that sucks planes towards it and throws them around); and so on. It plays beautifully and looks great, with a variety of graphics options and a really quick no-nonsense start-up and shut down. The game models are carefully constructed to a specific and appealing art style. The maps are designed with stunts, tricks, and complex fighting in mind. It's a simple formula carefully crafted to create a powerful and laugh-out-loud feeling of fun and joy, with long lasting appeal. This is the sort of game that you can and will play frequently. It isn't the sort of game that you'll sit down and 'complete': instead you'll find yourself returning to it day after day, like TF2, and having lots of laughs and fun with friends.

Barely anyone plays anymore... I regret spending money on this game for something that died in two months... I guess since it's free now, you'd have nothing to lose except hard drive space. Game mechanics were great just developers stopped caring and moved onto other projects. More players = more playability. No players = no playability.

Let me start off by saying that I've played for quite a bit prior to its steam release and that it's already come a long way. Servers: Can host your own, or join up in an ongoing public match. Ping is usually pretty good, with only the occasional lag. Weapons: Wide range of weapons from a hammer on a plane to a batapult. Yeah that's a catapult that fires bats. Some will feel overpowered (You'll curse the sniper planes multiple times a match) but you'll always be pleasantly surprised when someone kills you with the poison darts. Planes: The styles of planes match the artwork of the game (which is really great). They may be a bit hard to fly at first, but you'll get used to the controls. That, and these planes can stop on a dime, stall midair, and perform the most insane maneuvers you can think of. Some are a bit more powerful than others which can be annoying and aggravating. Maps: Very diverse set of maps, from a pirate ship to a city of neon lights. If you have a chance to admire the maps while you fly around dodging bats (Yeah, again, BATS – as in the mammal) you’ll see the beautiful design of the tunnels and ravines you can fly into. Lastly, the community is really nice and helpful. This isn’t a game where you play to rage and get mad at your team – this is a game where you have fun and laugh at every time you try to fly through a building and smash into a fan… Which happens to me a lot… All in all, I’d give it an 9/10. [i]We can’t stop here, this is bat country![/i]

This probably the best dogfighting game I have ever played. The controls are [i]hella[/i] tight, and have an arcade like feel. All flight and combat is heavily skill based so everything is about as fair as it can be—though you'll probably crash a fair bit at first. Runs smoothly at the highest graphical settings on my laptop, despite the intergrated graphics card. Arch Linux users will need to run `pacman -Syu gnu-free-fonts` if they are missing fonts and the game's menus appear blank. Although this is an Early Access title, the game is already very polished. This is absolutely a [i]proper[/i] beta, unlike many other Early Access titles that have been coming out lately.

[h1][b]Air Brawl * 6/10[/b][/h1] I've bought this game right before it became F2P... -.- I'm not really fond of flight simulators but I thought air brawl could be a simple but fun game to play online, driving planes and shooting other planes with friends. And I was right. The game is really simple, you have a fistful of planes to select, all of them with creative yet simple design and you can choose the weapons to equip. Then there's fun. Maps are of moderate dimensions, ranging from small towns, to temples with subterranean tunnels and it's fun to roll and dig into tunnels or small passages trying to avoid being taken down... You know, the classic fun with Flight combat simulators. A missing feature is music during gameplay and that's nonsense considering the epic and bad@$$ soundtrack you can hear in the game menu. I could understand this lack if they included a feature to add your own MP3s in a folder to use as custom soundtrack ingame, but they didn't. The Engine used for the game is Unity and, even though I'm usually against it (because used badly and unoptimized by developers), I have nothing to say against it. The minimalistic art of the game saves the engine from being too heavy to run on common machines even at maximum details, despite running in articulated maps. Problems come with maps and planes numbers, which soon come to be not enough, but that's something you can live with. The biggest problem lies in the community. This game is almost dead, there are a couple of servers running, sometimes full, sometimes they run all the game modes except the one you're looking for. And that wouldn't be a problem if the server creation wasn't impossible, as that's bugged as well since nothing happens once you try to launch the server. And this is a pity considering the game is simple but nice to play... And Free to Play... Now... [h1]+++PROs+++[/h1][list] [*][b] SIMPLE BUT EFFECTIVE.[/b] Air Brawl is a Minimalistic yet fun to play Flight Combat game [/list] [h1]---CONs---[/h1][list] [*][b] SERVERS.[/b] The game's worst flaw is the lack of servers. Very few servers available and not all of them have all Game modes. You could create your own server but the option is kind of bugged and doesn't let you by going in loop without any success. It's also the only way to play in LAN with friends on the same network so this is a very big Flaw. [*][b] MUSIC.[/b] Considering the Bad@$$ music you hear in the menu I was expecting to hear something during the matches but no. Too bad. [/list] [i]I played this game on this machine: Laptop Lenovo Z50 Intel Core i5-4210U 8Gb RAM DDR3 GeForce 840M/Intel HD Graphics 4400 Windows 10 Home x64[/i] [quote] You can follow my reviews through my curator page: [url=store.steampowered.com/curator/28510673]Everybody's reviews[/url] You can also join my Steam group: [url=steamcommunity.com/groups/EverybodysReviews]Everybody's reviews[/url] You are welcome to join and post your own reviews, we can support each other![/quote]

[b][u]UPDATE 2/23: DEVELOPMENT IS CONSIDERED FINISHED, BELOW REVIEW STANDS AS ISSUED [/u][/b] Dev response has dwindled with the imminent release of their other project, Super Ultra Monster Truck Madness Road Brawl, and a winding down of development has been strongly implied here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AirBrawl/comments/470c6l/an_open_letter_to_wilhelm_regarding_playerbase/d0adwc6 This game comes highly recommended for groups of friends and folks of the same skill levels. Casuals beware! [b]---EXCELLENT PLATFORM, UNPOLISHED GAME---[/b] I've flown hundreds of games and played for a little over 100 hours in Air Brawl at the time of this writing, and while fundamentally, I can recommend this as an excellent party game and at its most basic, it is a very enjoyable arcade flight sim, I can not give it a complete recommendation as of [b]1/14/2016 and again on 2/6/2016 (v1.02)[/b]. I've owned this and played on and off since its Early Access launch on Steam, and while there has been marked improvement in the 7 months since, it is not enough to make the core experience enjoyable for newbies or veterans beyond the occasional match. Vets who sink time into the game become insanely good pilots, and can end a match full of newbies and casual players in less than a few minutes, which drives player counts down until the game goes on sale again. Classes and weapons are unbalanced (heavily favoring weapons with high damage/physical output), many assets are too minimalistic to be useful in flight, and the 'Obstacle Course' mode has serious lag and difficulty problems. Ping spikes can cause friendly fire incidents and suicides. Games are simply too short, and there is no griefing protection in CTF matches. Offline mode is present, but the bots appear to be on a waypointing system and have a 360-degree fielf of view, and impossibly small turn radii, which is immensely frustrating and cannot be learned on as a new player. [i]Several weapons and combinations of weapons are able to slam pilots into walls (causing very, very high damage), and makes for very small kill times (seconds or less, as there is no spawn protection) and frustrations for any victim, new or old.[/i] This is my (and many other players') primary complaint that has not been addressed, nor, to my knowledge, is there any plan to. Sunray mines, shotguns, flak cannons, sticky bombs, and the ragnarok deal ludicrous amounts of damage or physics changes (or both!), and are the de facto overpowered weapons in the game. This game feels as if it were rushed out of Early Access far too early -- there is a lot of polish and content creation yet to be done. The developers are somewhat active on their subreddit for the game, but appear to have moved on to other projects (Highway Fight Squad, for instance). A time-to-kill and crowd control rebalance patch was debated, [url=https://www.reddit.com/r/AirBrawl/comments/3ryn6a/the_next_patch_will_bring_some_changes_to_time_to/]then committed to[/url], and then vanished around early November of 2015. Air Brawl is not a /bad/ game by any stretch of the imagination, but it's...frustrating, and for a lot of wrong (and a few right!) reasons. Games shouldn't be frustrating. I would be happy to reconsider this review, should support for the game resume, especially with a rebalance patch. However, as it stands I cannot currently recommend this game.

This game has potential but in it's current state everything revolves around 1 shot combos not fun unless you like that type of thing. No matchmaking whatsoever so expect to go VS people that will noob farm you. The controls are awesome and class vareation is well thought out works well. Pros: Fun/fast paced arena dogging fighting nothing really comes close in this genre Price $10 is very fair Runs great I've never seen it under 150FPS on max with my GTX 760 and I think 150 is the cap more than enough for 99.99% of people Very nice in game settings for a game this early in. Cons: A lot of the fights are determined by who sees who first even with basic attacks it only takes a few shots to take someone out. No matchmaking or noob only servers, so expect to see people going 25 and 0 giving new players no chance to learn No progression system The fandom level of the community is a bit much you will notice all the negative reviews get downvoted. So if you're looking into buying this I would wait untill more things are released I will update this review as things change.

I enjoy the game, but I think it requires a price drop to get more players in. Controls are tight, maps are interesting but price seems a bit high for a early access game. -------------------- That was my original review while I was rushing for the bus, and at that time, it was $10 USD. Currently it has -25% off, so that dismantles this point a little bit. But imagine you were me, a little while ago. I'll stand by my original review, the game is good, the controls are tight, the maps still are very interesting, the planes are balanced and well designed and the graphics are great and have time and effort put into them. They fit the style of the game for sure. I recommend the game. But. And that is the key word there. I think of the price in a LAN party scenario, 10 USD, that's 14.2 AUD at 70 cent exchange rate. If I asked my friends to buy the game, we would have fun that evening, but it isn't certain that we would be playing that all night. However, after the lan party, if someone wanted to play with randoms on online matchmaking then they couldn't. You know why? Because the servers are a barren wasteland. I have never been in a server in my time playing this game that has been even close to full, and that sucks. You can see the dev on /r/pcmasterrace handing out keys like they are hot cakes, trying to get people to play his game and not spend it on a CS:GO skin. I'd like to take this time to respond to the comments on my review. I'll start from the bottom to the top and I'll give the names as of the time of my review. [b]Leo Ortu Fenice[/b] "ummm $10 isn't high for such an indie game!" Sure, the game is good, but do we need more people on the servers to make it fun? Yes. [b]Sausage[/b] ""Price is too high for early access game" Really dude? You really haven't seen many early access games on Steam have you. Have a look at some of those prices. £5 is nothing." Really dude yourself, dude. Sure, other early access games on steam are expensive, and I prefer until the game is out to try it, But you know what the other games have, features, a lot of features. It's not about "is it an early access game" but it's what the game is like, and if it's an early access game, it should be priced less to encourage people to stay on the game. [b]Limping OJ Limpson 웃[/b] "Developers don't really understand the gaming community. Games like these will die within a month as people will need to queue for hours to find a match, only AAA games can create games based on Multiplayer only feature, games like these can't as soon there won't be anyone queueing for matches and you'll be stuck for hours on the same page and give up. Been there, done that x600" This is the comment that convinced me to update this review, this man has hit it on the head. Only AAA developers can make games with multiplayer only. And that is the truth. If I could give this man a kiss IRL I would 10/10. The game is good, and I won't give it a negitive recommend just because people aren't playing it, it needs to have replay value, and that's something it just doesn't have because of the playerbase, I think the base price of the game needs to be cut it half. I think it needs to be $5 USD, just to get more people onto the game, then increase the price to what you want. I just need a guareentee that there is going to be people, then I'll pick this game up again.