Air Control

Air Control
"The best flying game ever made." Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 would love to talk with you.
Genre(s): Flight simulation Platform(s): Microsoft Windows Release: May 23, 2014 Engine: Unity Developer(s): Killjoy Publisher(s): Killjoy Country: Russia

Air Control is a flight simulation game developed and published by Killjoy Games for Microsoft Windows. The game runs on the Unity 5 engine and was released on May 23, 2014. Within months of its release, it was pulled from Steam. Presumably due to the terrible reception, the developer used a sockpuppet account to release their second game, Zen Fish Sim. The game has been hailed as the worst game ever released on Steam as well as one of the worst games of all time.

Plot

The "Casual Mode part 1" has an extremely convoluted story that begins with human, dwarf, and zombie airline leaders meeting up at a campfire to plan a war. At first, you play as a flight attendant doing a series of increasingly strange tasks, but soon acquire enough "points" to "modify the cabin." This results in the player ending up on a plane full of zombies or a stone plane full of dwarves, they will talk to you in a very strange dialogue and mention the war they are planning. Later, back to a normal plane, you must find a zombie terrorist disguised as a normal passenger (this is made easier by the fact that he isn't disguised at all). After dealing with the zombie terrorist, you see a medieval knight next to a modern person talking on a cliché cliffhanger. After the strange dialogue cutscene, you warp to a double-deck plane and then shoot terrorists who are trying to "steal the plane" as the game puts it. After shooting terrorists, you warp to the "world's longest plane" which immediately crashes in a wasteland, then you time shift to before the crash and then after the plane crashed. In the aftermath of the crash, you shoot a terrorist who survived the crash and then take control of a nearby propeller plane and fly back to civilization.

In "Casual Mode part 2" you get sent to a plane where there are surgeons and organs lying around. After this, you warp to another double-deck plane and must shoot another terrorist trying to hijack the plane. After this, you warp to a plane taking off, but soon the engines fail and you survive the crash by jumping from the plane in midair. After this, you warp to another plane and must find another zombie terrorist disguised as a normal passenger but with the graphics blurred and distorted like the flight attendant was drunk. Then there is a video gaming parody show on the plane, it crashes again on a wasteland, and you must find a helicopter. When you touch the helicopter, you suddenly warp to control a plane to a destination, but when reaching the destination, there is a cutscene of your plane falling into the seawater. Then you get sent to random planes including one with surgeons and another with flying chairs and zero gravity. Then your time shifts to a futuristic city, then to one of the tutorial maps for the Unity engine, where you have to find the exit. Then you get sent to random planes including a plane full of wild animals and another plane with skeleton passengers and random organs vaguely associated with them. Then some more bizarre random things happen, possibly including a brief section where the player must control a semi-truck, a plane piloted by a zombie which has wood-panel floors and lounge furniture instead of chairs, and a section where the plane is sinking for no apparent reason.

In Realistic Mode, all you get to do on the plane is hear an audio stolen from Delta Air Lines, lock the doors, walk around it and stare at the petrified-looking passengers. Eventually, you get to actually control the plane to a destination.

In Killjoy Mode you begin the game already controlling a plane to a destination. What was supposed to happen after this is unknown since the game will crash if you manage to reach the destination.

Gameplay

The gameplay is quite varied, one time we fly a plane from place to place, another time we drive a truck from place to place and other times we shoot at enemies, sometimes the player also plays the role of a steward performing typical tasks for this profession, such as collecting garbage or providing services for passengers. The player is also sometimes given other forms of gameplay such as Flappy Bird in an airplane. The game is divided into 3 stages of the game, each of which differs in tasks and mini-games.

Why It's a Planewreck

1. It cost $6 on release but was a broken scam of a game and could be completed within 30 minutes if the game worked correctly which I for such a game is highly overpriced and rather such a game should be free, not paid.
2. Bad first impression, the plane on the title screen is underwater. Not helped by the fact that the background music is dramatic and the menu is terrible to navigate so the player can get frustrated very quickly with annoying music and terrible navigation that makes it difficult to select any option.
3. Poorly designed and programmed UI: every time you move the mouse you'll also move the camera and the game's title in the main menu simply sits above the aircraft without any alignment. Pop-up messages don't stop the camera from moving (which should have been very easy to program) and can stack on top of each other and make the text on each pop-up difficult to read. There are awkwardly placed "Lock Cursor" buttons that reset the cursor to the center of the screen, which would not have been needed if the cursor was actually locked to the center and only controlled the camera.
4. The game is infested with bugs that break essential game mechanics such as camera movement, or literally breaking the game either by causing the game to stop responding or causing an unhandled exception that crashes the game. Darklordjadow1 described Air Control as being "Built out of bugs" due to the absurd amount of bugs in the game. Notable examples below:
   • The game explains how to work around a game bug that causes the cursor to disappear while you are playing the game, which means that the developer knew about the bug and didn't care to fix it before publishing the game. However, doing what it says to do (press Alt and Tab at the same time) can cause the game controls to break.
   • Any attempt to restart a level or try a different mode breaks the game by either causing the mouse look and movement keys to stop functioning or rendering levels unwinnable.
   • On the missions where you have a firearm, the weapon will sometimes not reload completely, as the animations do not finish correctly, preventing you from firing a weapon until you complete the mission or die and respawn.
   • If you die during one of the shooting segments, the enemy AI does not reset and they will continue shooting at your respawn location, often resulting in death as soon as you spawn in.
   • When flying a propeller plane you sometimes warp to an absurdly far away position that causes the game to lag immensely and the distance to goal counter to display NaN (Not a Number). In this state, you cannot do anything and have to restart the game.
   • Also when flying a propeller plane, sometimes the plane suddenly stalls and you lose control of the plane, and the only way to fix this is to restart the level.
   • Activating the keypad that is used to open a door will drastically reduce the frame rate to below five frames per second. Similarly, the anti-gravity seats in one level will drop the frame rate when you bump into them.
   • In Realistic Mode, when controlling the plane, the camera orients itself at weird angles making it disorienting and nigh impossible to tell how far you are from the ground. You can fly a plane that can accelerate upwards from no speed which is the furthest from realistic as you can get. Sometimes the camera warps to inside the plane which makes it absolutely impossible to see outside the plane.
   • In Killjoy Mode the game crashes when you land the plane.
5. The gameplay is painfully repetitive as most activities are performed over and over again, many times the player has to be a stewardess, shoot the same enemies and fly the plane from the same place to the same place. There are unique mini-games but they are few and gruesomely short.
   • For the most part, the gameplay is so simple that it barely qualifies as a game.
6. There is no way to save game progress, when the game breaks or you exit the game, you have to restart the game from the beginning and this already shows the laziness of the creator and for this you have to finish everything in one fell swoop instead of being able to finish this game, for example, tomorrow.
7. Many grammar errors in the subtitles accompany the nonsensical tasks (ex: "You need to find reason while airplane fell down"; to do this, you... open a door) by which it can be concluded that the author had very little or no English knowledge and used the goggle translator poorly or blindly translated sentences.
8. Casual Mode begins with you completing tasks flight attendants are assigned to do (delivering coffee, picking up pillows, etc.), before placing you in the position of bizarre and mundane tasks such as moving from the cockpit and back, picking up bags of garbage the passengers spontaneously generate, and occasionally grabbing a Glock or a WW2 Tommygun to shoot terrorists. It's a very repetitive game and sometimes it has things that have nothing to do with such work.
9. Casual Mode has a crappy plane version of Flappy Bird. The bird is replaced with a plane and the pipes are replaced with mountains, but the basic mechanics of tapping to move upwards are still in the game. Brilliantly, this uses the same model of the plane as the rest of the game, including the entire interior, and so it runs terribly. The music playing during that stage is a ripoff of ProleteR's Faidherbe Square, to boot.
10. As a mechanic, all your tasks consist of simply pressing a button when it turns red which is incredibly stupid and is virtually no gameplay.
11. When you're piloting the plane (available in both Casual and Killjoy Mode), you must deal with awful controls, terrible camera angles, and having to quit the game and restart it if you crash the plane which you'll propably do that because there is a very good chance that you will rather crash into the ground or a building somewhere.
12. Terrible graphics that looks like a PS1, N64, Saturn, or Dreamcast game and visuals, with blocky and catatonic looking passengers, terrorists that have no animation and explode when they die, and "windows" which are just a static sky texture.
13. If you expected a coherent plot rather than a series of bizarre nonsequiturs, you came to the wrong place, the plot consists almost entirely of random events and has a lot of plot holes in it, and it might as well not be there.
14. In spite of the title screen showing an underwater plane, the in-game plane is quite a happy landing and taking off from the water which doesn't really make sense because it's hard to explain the whole coincidence or oversight.
15. Copyright violation: the developers unauthorizedly used the audio of the Delta Air Lines safety video. The artwork of the game also is a stolen artwork of a PrivatAir Boeing 787 in flight.

The actual image used for the game's cover art.

The Only Redeeming Quality

1. It is basically the gaming equivalent of a B movie made mostly from stock footage, and if played in the right frame of mind (i.e. drunk and with friends) it is incredibly funny.

Reception

The game was crushed on the day of its release by negative reviews criticizing the graphics, gameplay, story, controls and almost everything else, and the game was hailed as the worst game ever to hit Steam, earning the lowest rating on this platform in history, even worse than games like FlatOut 3 or Airport Simulator 2014, and even as one of the worst games of all time and compared to games such as Big Rigs.

GameSpot's Kevin VanOrd awarded the game a 1/10 which is the lowest rating that can Gamespot give for the game (only Big Rigs and Ride to Hell: Retribution got that grade beside this game), stating it was unthinkable how anyone could ask for money for this "broken scam masquerading as a computer game".

Air Control was mocked and ridiculed by gamers to the extent that Valve pulled it from Steam months after it was released. Darklordjadow1 was scared by the fact that this game is where Valve draws the line of quality required for a game to be on Steam. He also said, "Air control is not a game, it is a simulation of the effects of extended drug use!". Tyler Wilde, writing for PC Gamer, called the game "one giant bug" and advised players not to purchase the game. Wilde also found that the game contains audio from the Delta Air Lines safety video.

Caddicarus listed Air Control as the #2 worst game of 2014 behind The Slaughtering Grounds, and he was unable to describe the game because he was laughing so much at the game's quality, before calmly saying it was delisted from Steam.

The game is known in the French online community for being reviewed by TheFantasio974 (aka just "Fanta"); he describes it as "the worst game on Steam" and is in constant shock and hilarity at the surrealistically bad quality of the game. During the "Flappy Bird" segment, he sings along to the Faidherbe Square music, repeating "I am strolling in my plane because it is totally awesome", which achieved a level of memetic status.

Due to massive plagiarism, BartekGM compared the game to Limbo of the Lost and unlike the second game gave a 0/10 for literally everything when the first game had at least a 2/10 for audio. NRGeek was also harshly critical of the game and even said he wanted to know what the origins of the game were, even stating that it was an alpha version rather than a game.

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