Casual Fridays 03 – Planes, Planes and Planes

Welcome to Casual Fridays, a weekly review of some of the casual flash games that you can find all around the net. There are a lot of them so we thought we’d help you weed out the bad ones and play the really good ones!

A green ship with a blue halo is firing missiles at a grey metal gunship while a military character on the bottom right corner talks.

AIs have it hard.  If you’re left around you get to do all the menial tasks that humans never wanted to do, and you’re never really trusted thanks to the whole ‘Skynet’ thing which exists in all realities at the very same time.  In Ghost Guidance you play an AI that just wants to escape and you’re fighting against the group that created you that wants you gone.  You do that by infecting ships so that you can take complete control of the vessel to facilitate your escape.

The First thing that strikes me as awesome about this game is the introduction screen.  It’s a pretty flavourful little opening page where you get the story of the game, and the fact that play game option is “Sound Evacuation Alarm and Infect the Escape Pod.”  There’s just something about how the screen plays out that tickles my fancy.  The game play itself is a standard shooter, but instead of having to deal with power-ups floating about the place you can just take over whatever plane that’s in your way.  It’s great because you don’t have to worry too much about avoiding the bullets, each ship comes with its own health power, but you can’t totally ignore it because the AI loses energy as it floats about the place waiting for you to have it take control of another ship.

A black screen with the image of a scientist in the corner looking over their shoulder

Random Value Judgement Rating: 00101 Five AIs using Binary out of an unknown secret cabal of AIs planning to take over the world.

A Timeline with dates from 1835 to 1947.

I will admit at the forefront that I’m not a big fan of war simulation games.  I don’t really think fighting in a major conflict is something that’s cool and nifty and all that.  However, despite my bias, Steambirds managed to be something I’d play.  What happens is that you’re pilots flying planes in a turned based format.  You get to set up what you want to do next and repeat until all of your planes have crashed or you’ve managed to crash the other planes.  The levels are challenging and what your planes are going to be doing, and then hit the next turn button.  You’ll see the action play out for a couple of seconds and then you get to play your orders again.  The planes also are able worth the trouble to get through and they tryto represent a new year in either the current conflict (which starts at the beginning of 1907 and gothrough certain dates in WWI which sound cool but I wasn’t really able to verify.  Not that it really matters, but any little bit of easily verifiable facts would have been super cool.

The controls are great.  Not only are the planes abilities easily accessed but it also gives you the range at which your planes can move.  There’s a lot of strategy involved in what you’re going to do depending on the extra skills your ships have, and it might have been interesting to be able to modify your planes, give you the option to try different things to get through some of the harder levels.

The music is epic, and a little repetitive so you will be using the mute button pretty quickly.  Give it a once through, admire it and then turn it off when it starts to loop.

Two blue planes are behind two red planes. The red planes have arrows indicating where they will be flyign next.