SimplePlanes

If you played with some book about "How to make paper airplanes" when you was a kid, you will LOVE this game!!! I'm 33yo now and I actually grab my old book to try to recreate its old paper models on the game. Trust me when you get your first own model to fly you'll love it more than before!!!! (No matter how ugly your airplane is). Repeat 100% recommended if you love to construct things with blocks and test them a lot!!

The idea of the game is neat, but the flight simulation is horrible, despite what the advertising says. The little prop plane I built in the tutorial took off, pitched straight up to 85 degrees in less than half a second, and climbed straight up like it was an F-16. Laughable. The game apparently doesn't even implement basic aerodynamic effects such as stalling. It is not a simulation; it's just a toy.

Back when Microsoft Flight Simulator came on a single 3.5" floppy, (I know, I'm admitting my age here), it came with a very simple flight dynamics program that allowed you to design your own basic plane and try it out. I spent hours with it, just as others might relax with puzzle games. This game does exactly that, and very well, with much better visuals and more physics options. Working on basic design and testing software just for the fun of it, has an appeal not readily filled by other game genres. The fact that it doens't do anything else is not a drawback - neither do plastic "building bricks" until you apply your imagination, and they are hardly going out of style. :-) Easy enough to use for both young and old, from the young lego builder, to the teen who thinks its funny to crash stuff, to the imaginative older hobbyist who enjoys building models, this "game" will provide hours of fun. Highly recommended!

As a game, Simple Planes barely takes off the ground. There are some "missions" you can participate in ("beat a land speed record" or "win this race") and- Oh. Wait. That's it. I mean, you can also just fly around, but that gets old pretty quickly. But as an editor to build planes, it's a whole lot of fun. Pretty much anything you can think of (that works within the laws of physics) can be made. I've built tilt-rotors, rockets, canards, flying wings, flying boats, biplanes, amphibious tanks -- even my own take on a lifting body (I call it the Flying Waffle, just to be different). So long as you like building planes, this will never get old. So, really, the thing that will determine how much you like Simple Planes is what you are looking for. If you're after a game with an editor, I'd say move along. But if you find the flip-side appealing, you're in for a pretty good time.