I don’t play enough educational games. Sure, I played the (ostensibly) educational game Climate Trail , and I suppose my hundreds of hours of Rimworld have taught me a great deal about myself, but I wish there were more games for adults that tried to teach me something.

Enter Aviators.

I’m pretty sure I can find a free plane in an Alaskan junkyard. Just saying.

Aviators is a genre-defying game about the experiences of Polish pilots serving with the RAF during WWII. While I and the developers classified it as an “adventure” game, it’s more accurate to say that it flits from gameplay style to gameplay style, depending on the needs of whatever story it’s telling at any given time. Aviators tells the story of a number of Polish pilots, some of which are based on true stories , providing the player with the opportunity to relive these pilots’ experiences caring for and repairing planes, flying over occupied Europe, and engaging in dogfights with Nazi Junkers. It’s a fantastic story for a game, and the inclusion of real people and their stories adds a sense of honour and respect to the act of making a game like this.

It’s this versimilitude and dedication to lovingly telling these pilots’ stories that is the game’s biggest selling point. I’ve made my love of airplanes and everything airplane-related abundantly clear. Getting to putter around a hangar, carefully patching up and refueling Spitfires while using old navigation techniques and exploring the bellies of these planes was an absolute delight. I enjoyed the clear love that had been put into ensuring I could smoothly move through the plane, read whatever factoid I wanted, and feel, however briefly, like an aviatrix. The hangar level and its dedication to telling the stories of the female Polish pilots are by far the high point of the game, and in many ways, feel like the game the developers wanted to make before having to add entire extra sections to it to pad out the play time.

Smiley death!

Aviators’ gameplay isn’t limited to just futzing about a hangar, cooing over old planes. Through the hangar level, the game incorporates some brief gameplay elements before moving on to levels centred around dogfights over the skies of occupied Europe. Much of the actual gameplay is devoted to these dogfights, with each having an introduction explaining its significance, who is fighting, and why. These cutscenes provide a nice way to make otherwise monotonous and generic shooting gallery-style dogfights seem more meaningful, but do very little to improve on the actual gameplay itself.

I understand that, playing on a touchpad, gameplay elements like shooting galleries will be more difficult for me. I understand I’m not getting the full gameplay experience, and that I’m intentionally making things more difficult for myself. However, I still feel safe in saying that Aviators’ dogfight sections are miserable examples of what aviation-based shooting games can be.

Aviators’ shooting sections revolve around the same pattern: an introduction explains who is flying, where, and why before the player is thrust behind the trigger of a machine gun and told to shoot the targets marked with an Iron Cross. These might be planes, trains, or boats, it doesn’t matter. All are equal targets, with no real difference in how any of them play. In each case, the player must land a number of shots on target as the plane soars past whatever the player was meant to be aiming for. The guns themselves are fairly sluggish, and the plane ride jittery, making it difficult to stay on target and hit enough to actually destroy anything. More often than not, I found myself nearly killing a target before the plane started flying at an angle that made the target inaccessible, at which point, I’d have to switch and have the entire process happen again. In some cases, this was fine, and my survival was all that really mattered. In others, overflying the target meant an immediate game over and needing to retry the level. The game never made it clear which targets were vital and which were not, making it an unpleasant surprise when I got unceremoniously booted back to the beginning of the level.

What’s interesting, though, is that, as unpleasant as these game elements are, they fit perfectly with the game’s ultimate objective. This is a game that seeks to tell the story and provide the player with a taste of the experiences of Polish pilots during WWII. The reality of that experience is that it was dangerous, annoying, and jittery to be one of these pilots. The gameplay, flawed though it is, is flawed in the name of authenticity.

I’m torn on whether that works and how it ultimately impacts this game.

To be clear, from a gameplay perspective, Aviators is a miserable experience. Beyond the flaws of the dogfight sections, even the generally pleasant hangar level has some awful puzzle-esque tasks with no instruction or clear way to figure out what the task is actually asking for. Even those tasks that are intuitively obvious (like the route-finding task in the screenshot included above) have miserable controls that make actually completing the task hellish.

The lack of instruction, though, feels like it’s intended in the same vein as the sluggish guns in the dogfight levels. Pilots working in these hangars would not have had a little tooltip telling them how to solve the task in front of them. This lack of instruction or guidance feels like another attempt at capturing that versimilitude. Much like the pilots of WWII, it’s up to me to figure out how to tune a radio, rewire a starter, or draw a line on a map.

The difference, of course, is that those pilots had training. Those pilots were familiar with the technology they were using. The last time I touched a radio was when I banged on the radio of my partner’s dying Buick to try to get it to give me my CD back. There’s a knowledge gulf here, and expecting me to bridge it by sheer force of will just means I’m going to have a very bad time.

All of this leaves me torn on how to evaluate Aviators. As a game, while it’s beautifully rendered, it is not fun to play, with its dedication to versimilitude getting in the way of decent and engaging gameplay. As a simulation of the experience of Polish aviators and a retelling of a forgotten history, though, it is a delight. More than anything, this is a game that feels like it belongs in a museum, playing on a loop in a motion simulator likely broken within the first month of its availability by the constant stream of excited children piling into the cockpit and screaming about Nazis.

I can assure you I’d be one of them. Just less so when I’m on my own, baffled by the concept of tuning a radio.

Developer: Chronospace

Genre: Adventure

Year: 2024

Country: Poland

Language: English/Polish

Play Time: 1.5 Hours

Youtube: https://youtu.be/IuwGWzOVVPE