Air Offensive
| Platforms: | PC |
| Publisher: | BlueLine Games |
| Developer: | Bluemoon Interactive |
| Genres: | 3D Shooter / First-Person Shooter |
| Release Date: | 2003 |
| Game Modes: | Singleplayer |
Air Offensive is a budget-priced arcade flying game. You hover more than fly here, forever gliding on a sleek invisible pillow, fighting enemy craft spread over voxel-rendered maps. It reminds one a lot of Thunder Brigade, except you control your craft with the keyboard and not the mouse or joystick. The missions are also a lot more simpler – each level revolves around blasting a set number of enemies to advance. Simple briefings before each mission outline the basic premise, but the only difference between them is the change in scenery – rivers, deserts and lush mountain ranges are all on offer, though they sport few environmental props to make them truly unique.
Gameplay is simple to the extreme. You dodge incoming fire and do your best to tail it behind enemies and fire at them continually. You need to watch your ammo – going empty means that you must hightail it back to your base where you can land and rearm. Good luck doing it with an enemy craft behind you; they’re very tough to shake. The AI is simple overall but they do perform simple turns and dodges, and also tend to gang up when numbers are on their side. Later on you get access to more powerful weaponry and ships, and there’s also a high score board that measures each players’ progress.
System Requirements: Pentium 90 MHz, 64 MB RAM, Win95
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These games – Thunder Brigade and this one – are both big technical feats. They do software rendering but present really awsome landscapes and graphics for the time.
When I was having a Pentium 1 MMX on 200mhz in the era of already widespead hardware acceleration these games (and others like Plane Crazy) were the only ones that made us possible to enjoy “modern-looking” 3D graphics using our old computers.
Are these ground-shattering by gameplay? Not. Neither are awful at all however and I always valued those developers who have spent so much time writing things no one should be interested in writing: fast software renderers for the few poor people who still use them.
TL;DR: Business-wise it was not really a “good decision” to go in this direction and make things for budget. It might seem as “we make something budget to harvest money from those who are poor” but in practice most game development companies who ever try budget releases fail utterly in the long run in most cases. It is brave and heroic instead to support old things – especially if the then-modern apis like opengl or d3d was much more easier than creating your own renderer from scratch.