When we first learned about Final Approach last year, we thought it looked a lot like a VR version of games like Flight Control (iOS, 2009). And while that wouldn’t be a bad thing—as Flight Control is a great little mobile game—Final Approach, goes way deeper.
I got my hands on the latest version of Final Approach from Phaser Lock Interactive today, played on the HTC Vive Pre, at Valve’s SteamVR Developer Showcase. I thought I knew pretty much what I was getting myself into. I’d be guiding little airplanes through the air to their destination and trying to keep them from crashing, until there were too many coming at once that I couldn’t keep up. I was pleasantly surprised to find a lot more going on.
The virtual reality platform of course opens up the ability to trace lines in 3D instead of 2D (like on a smartphone) which opens the door to more interesting maneuvers and vehicles with different behaviors. Helicopters, for instance, can be used to pick up and deliver cargo by tracing a line over to the cargo and using a button on the Vive controller to lower a magnetic crane. And once you drop that cargo off, there may still be more to do. Some sequences throughout the levels take you out of your birds-eye perspective into first-person scale to perform task on the ground.
At one point I was on a city level and had to use a helicopter to drop off a generator to a construction crew. After dropping it off, I zoomed down to the first-person view and had to do a quick puzzle to get the generator powered up by throwing a series of switches in the right order. Other moments on the ground had me scaring seagulls off the runway and putting out a plane fire with a big hose. The possibilities of these first-person mini-game moments seems nearly infinite. You could go as deep as medivacing an injured patient through the air and then participating in the surgery at the hospital!
And there’s still more detail to the experience. On many of the levels there’s tiny little AI characters running around. Some of them even have jobs, like firefighters onboard an aircraft carrier level who will put out fires of crashed planes. There was a mid-air collision at one point (totally not my fault, I swear) which resulted in two pilots parachuting down into the water. The Final Approach developers told me that there were little rescue crews that would take care of them.
On this same level I launched a series of drones from the aircraft carrier which turned out to go crazy and start attacking my own planes in the sky. To get rid of them I had to get the fighter jet that they were targeting to fly by a gunship which blasted the drones out of the sky.
Rather than just tracing lines through the sky to land planes, there’s a bunch going on in Final Approach at both the macro and micro scale, and it feels like the design space is nearly infinite when you mix the two. This is what I saw in just a brief session with the game. Rather than a simple survival-style flight controller game like we’ve seen on mobile, Final Approach feels like it could be excitingly approaching something of a virtual reality RTS with even more complex gameplay still to come, like “training [vehicles] to battle forest fires, perform heroic rescues and full military strikes,” say the developers.
Disclosure: Valve covered airfare and lodging for one writer to attend the SteamVR Developer Showcase.
