Ultrawings

I don't know about you, but I've always found games like Pilotwings to be incredibly relaxing. There's just something about flying through the air on a sunny day with scenic beaches below that helps me forget about the everyday drama and stress of the real world. That's what I expected going into Ultrawings, the brand-new flight simulator by Bit Planet Games. I expected to climb into the cockpit and spend a relaxing day soaring over tropical islands below, but turbulence in the form of user-interface issues and rampant technical bugs sent my plane crashing to the ground. Buckle up, this is going to be a bumpy ride.

Ultrawings is an open-world flying game where you pick up jobs, earn money and buy new airfields. Along the way you'll pick up new planes that will unlock a bunch of new jobs, where you can earn even more money and conquer the world. Okay, maybe it's not that dramatic, but the pieces are all here for a fun and casual flight sim with more than a passing resemblance to Pilotwings.

The open world is made up of a series of islands that are all surrounding a large volcano. We initially start out with an Ultralight plane and only a handful of jobs, but that will be enough to fly to the next island and unlock a new set of challenges. The events will take you through the cities, past giant statues, over farmland, through rocky cliffs and up to the top of that volcano we just talked about. Each island has a slightly different flavor, and I was excited to earn enough money to unlock the next airport and fully explore the new locations.

What's nice is that the planes feel dramatically different from one another. We start out with that Ultralight, but quickly move on to the Glidester, which has its own learning curve. Instead of just keeping the propeller going, the Glidester gains speed when you press the boost button. That's it. You just glide around the islands until you either land or boost, which requires its own set of skills. And then there's the Gee Racer, which may be fast, but it sure is hard to see anything in that cockpit.

The different events are also diverse, but maybe not as interesting. A lot of the jobs come down to flying through a series of rings in the air, shooting at balloons and sometimes both at the same time. Other events will award you money for landing in weird locations and taking pictures of the points of interest. There are nail-biting scenarios you'll need to complete, like running out of fuel and making it to the landing strip without crashing into the ground. There are different jobs for each type of plane, which makes for a lot of content. This is not the kind of game you'll beat in a single sitting, and probably not even a weekend. There's a lot here.

One thing I didn't realize going into Ultrawings is that it started its life as a virtual reality game. In fact, I'm pretty sure every version of the game outside of the Switch edition that I played has some sort of VR support. This surprised me at first, since so much of the user-interface is based around head tracking and pointing at the thing you want to interact with. This is fine, albeit annoying, when cycling through jobs and trying to buy a new plane, but hard to deal with once you're actually in the cockpit and flying over the ocean. Suddenly the game wants you to do things that would be easy in VR with a controller, and the results aren't especially good.

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A great example of this is when you're trying to fly the plane while shooting at balloons. The problem is that you can't do both things at once, so the game wants you to switch between flying the airplane and moving your head around. This Switch version tries to split the difference by allowing you to use the controller's gyros functionality, but it pales in comparison to real head tracking in VR. This is the kind of mini game that I have to imagine is a whole lot of fun in virtual reality, but on the Switch, these modes can be a real nightmare.

It also forces you to play in the first-person view, which can be incredibly annoying when trying to do the Gee Racer jobs. If you're wondering why I don't just switch to the third person view, it's because Ultrawings is broken. There's this annoying bug that prevents you from moving your head around after switching from the default first-person view to the easier to use third-person. Since you have to use the in-game cell phone to exit each job, you'll need to switch back into the first-person mode when you land. But this means that you can't move your head, because the game thinks you're done playing. You're just stuck there, paralyzed to the seat and staring straight forward. You can't even pause the game to restart. It's as if half of the controller turned off for no reason. You have to reload the game and try that job over again, this time remember to never, ever switch to the third-person view.

But even if it did work properly, the different camera perspectives simply don't give you the details you need. For example, you can't use the cell phone in the third-person. That's a big deal, because we can't see what our objective is, how many balloons we need to pop, how much time we have left or how many points we earned for hitting that bullseye. It ends up being a situation where you're basically forced to play the game from the first-person perspective, whether you like it or not. There are just times seeing the whole plane makes more sense, like landing jobs and flying through hoops, but the game seems to go out of its way to lock you in the cockpit. Again, that may be fine when you have a VR helmet strapped to your head, but it makes it hard to play on the Switch.

Another thing that makes it hard to play is the unstable frame rate. There are times when everything runs smoothly, but I ran into extended sessions where the frame rate dipped down into the single digits. This not only makes the game incredibly hard to play, but also impossible to look at for long stretches of time. It got to the point where it was starting to make me feel a bit nauseous. I know that airplanes usually have barf bags, but I don't want to use it when I'm playing a video game. It's worth noting that the developers have indicated that they are aware of the problem and plan on fixing it in the near future.

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The depressing thing is that Ultrawings has a lot of the pieces to make a great flight simulator. There's tons of content, diverse islands to explore, colorful graphics and planes that all feel radically different. But with so many technical problems and UI quirks, I'm having a hard time recommending this version. It could be that this game is amazing in VR and incredibly fun on PC and PlayStation 4, but you're in for a bumpy ride on the Switch.

Ultrawings is another example of a virtual reality game ported to a system without a VR helmet. The result is a good-looking game with tons of content that is dogged by game-breaking technical problems and a user-interface that clearly wasn't created with the Switch in mind. There's fun to be had here, but you may want to wait until Bit Planet Games has issued a patch or two, and even then, you may want to opt for one of the VR versions. Or just go back to playing Pilotwings. That's what I'm going to do.