I immediately regretted my purchase of Luftrausers, at first. It seems like a somewhat limited phone game in scope and features. The unlocks didn’t seem varied enough and the rounds are so “rinse-and-repeat” that they blended together the same way that time-killers and endless runners on your phone do. It doesn’t help that the mobile marketplace bottomed out so hard that I can’t rightly value these experiences anymore. If I play it short bursts and it’s mobile – I’m playing Luftrausers on my Vita – I end up feeling it’s worth maybe $1.99, tops.
Eventually the fact that I paid more than $1.99 pushed me to keep playing, and the genius of Luftrausers‘ movement revealed itself. What felt like limiting controls start to let you perform amazing stunts – midair flips, stalls and trick-180-killshots – that will keep you coming back for more. Even though the mechanics grew on me and the challenges keep me coming back, the lingering feeling that I’ve just barely gotten my money’s worth keeps my from falling in love with the game.
I’ll keep plugging away at it until I kill that damned blimp. Maybe things get better after that…
You’re certainly not alone, but it pains me to see you bring up the price here. Given that I’ve already gotten many hours of aerial gymnastics and dog-fighting out of this game, I can’t really fathom quibbling over a sub-$10 purchase. That knee-jerk “this a mobile game” mentality is gradually stripping the value from games that very clearly have a lot care put into them!
It pained me to keep thinking of the price, but the mobile-game feel is present throughout the game. And the iOS race to the bottom cemented the value of these games years ago. I was (and still am) a vocal opponent of the devaluation.
It just makes me wish Sony et al would make their platforms an open market for these kinds of smaller team experiences. The Indie Arcade section of the 360 was close, but so poorly managed that it was a wasteland. I think the 3DS or the Vita make a much better target for those developers.
Imagine handing the developers of popular iOS games the source for Vita or 3DS games…