Grade: C+
An unfinished but promising wingsuit flight simulator.
Volo Airsport is a wingsuit simulator that allows you to fly and dive and coast through a gorgeous mountainside. The drop points for your flight can vary, and some are way up in elevation, and others are lower to the ground. You fly by adjusting pitch, yaw, and roll controls, but controlling human flight is not an easy feat. At the end of each run, the goal is to pull your parachute cord at just the right time and hopefully land gently enough that you avoid breaking all of your bones.
Vicariously live out a dangerous hobby
I had a phase not too long ago where I was slightly obsessed with wingsuit diving. As a fan, I would replay all of the highlight reels, watch the documentaries, look up wingsuits for purchase, and keep up to date on the blogs. This strange sport piqued my adventurous instinct. On the other hand, wingsuiting is super expensive, requires physical fitness, and wingsuiting one of the most dangerous sports in existence. I have looked over some troubling statistics where many people who go wingsuiting don’t live to tell the tale. Suffice it to say, seeing this game in the bundle piqued my interest.
In the simulator, there’s a good chance with every bird-man maneuver that you’ll crash horribly into the mountainside. When you hit the ground, the minor damage on your little stick man avatar is purple, and major is red. One time, I landed with no body damage at all, and that was my best run. The rest of the time, I crashed horribly. A couple of times, I just broke my legs, and that was cause for cheers.
Promising, but still incomplete
Put on permanent hiatus in 2017, Volo Airsport is an abandoned game. (Permanent hiatus is an oxymoron, but I get what they meant!). In good news, the devs recently opened sourced the code for others to pick up.
While mostly completed, the most unfinished aspect of the wingsuiting simulator is the implementation of the physics. I don’t think it is possible in the real world to catch a draft that holds you perfectly still and aloft in one place for infinite time. Have unlimited parachutes that you can pull and release as many times as you want was strange as well.
Even with the game being unfinished, it still has several unique elements and promising graphics. I enjoyed my time gliding through the air and getting a sense of the wingsuit sport, especially from the relative safety of my computer.
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