Superflight PC/Steam Game Review

Superflight, from indie studio GrizzlyGames, is $3 on Steam.

I think it's the cheapest game I've ever reviewed that isn't a free-to-play title.

In the game, you control a character made out of blocky shapes as they fly around worlds made out of blocky shapes. The worlds are randomly generated, and it's very easy to generate your own by typing a new seed into the system, by flying through a portal, or by flying to the bottom of the stage.

The goal of the game is to float as close as possible to pieces of the environment, and for even more points you can fly through holes/caves. It's like that instinct that we all have to fly planes under bridges in big budget open world games...made into an entire video game.

That may not seem like much, but the mechanics here are done well enough that you'll probably want to keep playing it for well longer than the three or so hours it'll take you to get all of the achievements. The game has no strict ending, and the main goal outside the achievements is to compete with your friends and the world to get a higher score.

Each run ends when you crash, and you will quite often...but the game reloads so quickly and generates new worlds so instantly that it's frighteningly easy to just keep playing and playing and playing.

Controls work well with either the keyboard or a gamepad. There's no official mouse support, but with the only control option being to steer, the keyboard and gamepad work fine. I found some fun Steam Controller presets that enabled the controller's gyro for tilt flying, but I was most comfy on the good ol' thumbstick.

The flight mechanics are thrilling, leading to many exhilarating and relaxing moments over the course of even a short session. It's good that the flying works so well, because that's really the only thing you do.

Superflight has a striking visual style that's artistic at times and almost repulsive at others, thanks to color schemes that are generated right alongside the levels. I found some amazingly lush worlds and some that were covered in horrifying clashing pastels. The game was made in Unity and isn't terribly demanding as far as computing power goes. The only weird technical issue I had was with the motion blur effect. I don't think it's implemented quite right. With it on, I experienced some stuttering and some weird flickering on non-blurred elements in the background of the image. And it didn't matter whether I ran it on my laptop's integrated card, or an Nvidia 1060 or 1070.

Aside from the motion blur looking strange, the only other issue I have with the aesthetic is the sound design. I know that this wasn't a big budget game, but the library-sourced sound effects might be grating to some people. It's easy to turn them off. At first I hated the cash register sounds that the points make as you rack them up, but they grew on me.

It's quite easy to save maps that you like to a list built just for that purpose, and although the game has online leaderboards, it doesn't have any other multiplayer support. If you want to share a map with a friend, you'll have to copy and paste the seed name/number.

Even if you were to just play the game until you unlocked the achievements, there's absolutely more than three dollars worth of content here. It's an easy-to-learn hard-to-master sort of game that has lots of fun in it for anyone who finds the core concept appealing.

I bought this game with my own money and I was not paid for this review. I mean come on. Even though I reviewed a million headphones I never got sent any of those, you think people are gonna send me games? :)

Thanks for reading!