Recent reviews by Caravan of the Souls

As a player of Furious Angels, I was pretty excited for Morfeo's next game. After update 1.62/1.63 for Furious Angels, he announced AFTERBURN, an arcade-y air combat game in the same general style as Furious Angels. It's been in development for a little while, but it's finally in Early Access. Some things from the pre-release screenshots were changed (RIP playable Valkyries), but the game has delivered on its promise. High speed uncomplicated air combat, with a focus on close range dogfights. I'm excited for whatever future updates bring, and I'll definitely be playing this for a while.

AFTERBURN is easy to learn, but very hard to master. The controls, as with Morfeo's last game, are about as simple at you can get. Move the mouse to point your aircraft, left click to fire, and right click to use afterburners/do a barrel roll. Optionally, you can use W on the keyboard instead, or use a stick or gamepad. Getting the hang of the controls takes maybe about 15 seconds, if that. Mastering the game, however, is much harder. You will spend a lot of time playing the same mission over and over again, probably because of that one enemy that just keeps blowing you out of the sky. Thankfully, it's very easy to do it all over again. When a mission ends, no matter the result, you get a simple, clean score screen. If you won, you can continue to the next mission. If not, you can immediately retry, and get right back into the action. It's definitely very frustrating at first, but the feeling of getting better and beating a mission that had you struggling for hundreds of attempts is incredibly satisfying.

Obviously, AFTERBURN is currently not a feature-complete game. However, updates come relatively frequently, and usually bring some interesting or welcome changes (looking at you, fixed lead indicator). The last major update introduced more aircraft variety, and the number of both enemy types and player choices is expected to increase as development continues. Something that would be nice is more replayability. Currently, you get one 6 mission campaign every 36ish hours, and once you finish, the only thing you can do is endlessly replay the final mission in search of a better score. Something like randomly generated missions with a separate leaderboard, or maybe an endless mode, also with separate leaderboard, could give players who finish the campaign something to do. I'm not sure how an endless mode would work in AFTERBURN, however. It could lead to the player being completely overwhelmed by enemies and being burned out by a pace constantly set to "insanity". Then again, that's how Furious Angels worked, and I liked that, so maybe it could work.

If you decide to buy AFTERBURN (you really should), I would recommend using the 30mm cannon. The 25mm turret and missiles both have their merits, and players will defend both of them, but the 30mm is the most reliable option, and in my opinion, leads to the most engaging gameplay, with a strong focus on dogfights and player skill. The 30mm also perfectly captures the feeling of old-school air combat, full of turning fights where the goal was getting your forward fixed guns on target. Oh, and one more thing. If you go for the highest score, you should start to learn to be satisfied with second place. In AFTERBURN, the leaderboard has two categories: Fmily, and everyone else. Since Fmily is always in first, second place is effectively the first place for humans, because Fmily is just insanely good. (For example, at the moment, there is currently a 2000 point deficit between Fmily and second place.)

(Still waiting for the sequel to Furious Angels though.)

10/10, would shoot my hard-earned money at people again.

Great game. Controls might be a bit strange at first, but you'll learn quickly, and if there's something that just doesn't work, mention it on the discussions page, and the devs will probably add it. Very mechanically sound, plenty of variety, nice lore for all the items (spent quite a while reading all of them), and fits all kinds of playstyles, from actual tactics to throwing money at problems (like me).

Even though I've only played this game for about 55 hours, I can solidly say this is a game worth buying, especially on sale. Even though it's 5 years old, it still manages to be a really fun game that sucks up my time in a very enjoyable way. So, BUY THE GAME! (Especially on sale.)