Grade: F
A glorious mess of a game where you sort of fly a plane.
So a 2D flight simulator sounds like a silly idea, but somehow the implementation was even worse than my low expectations. It’s “The Room” version of a video game. There’s just so much wrong; that’s where I got some laughs.
The lowlights
For the low, low price of 20 Euros, you can unlock a total of 1 plane to fly. Unfortunately, the plane itself is only able to be seen from the side.
The controls are entirely mysterious, and it was a challenge figuring out how to take the plane off the ground. I ended up blindly mashing the keyboard for a while.
Soon, I found that nothing kept the plane from flipping end over end like a bowling ball. Realistic!
On the one flight, I had an event! There was an ill passenger. The popup made it that I couldn’t see the game screen, and there was no button to get rid of the intrusive popup, so that was that.
Is it actually malware?
So bad this game was that I found it suspicious. When I installed this game, was it some malware that PHRS software lumped into the racial justice bundle to get people to pick it up? Is it ineptitude or some malicious plot?! This game dev group appeared to have a website on their google play store. But, clicking the link, the website https://phrssoftware.000webhostapp.com/index.html, had gone offline and dark. But, I found a Blogspot site for them, https://phstsoftware.blogspot.com/, and they seem to be a real company.
I took a few minutes and poked around the game code. From a cursory review, it looks like standard compiled code for a unity app, and so that checked out. Of course, I could be a crazy person and uncompiled the code and do a deep dive, but my strong suspicion is that these couple folks in Spain on this dev team are probably just feeling their way through the industry and publishing stuff amateurishly. It’s not a good project, but presumably, there’s no nefarious intent.
Hopefully, PHRS software will have more success in its future endeavors.
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