Over G Fighters is a Japanese flying sim which lets you control over 30 modern-warfare jets which fight in missions all over the world. While the large number of campaigns and missions coupled with a good number of jets provide a large amount of content, the game still has a lot of negatives that hold it back from reaching its full potential.
The presentation is pretty awful; it looks to be straight out of a Playstation 1 game, not a next-gen console. The cinematics, in form of animated comics, are filled with stereotypical characters that provide useless information in bad voice-overs.
Although the Single-Player portion is the biggest chunk of the game, the developers did include 2 multiplayer modes. And while as a whole the game is full of content, it still leaves a lot to be desired in its entertainment aspect.
Over G Fighters doesn’t really follow any of the other flying games that have made it on consoles. The gameplay is pretty tame and can actually be quite boring. You pick a mission, you choose your pilot, you choose your jet, and you fly into your mission where you have to either take out another jet or a ground target. Whatever your target is, the system will automatically lock it on for you to shoot with your missile, long before you see it. Many of the missions can be completed rather quickly, your missiles never miss once they are locked on, and often times it becomes difficult to tell one mission apart from the other. Picking one type of campaign will block others; therefore you may need to go through the game several times in order to unlock all the achievements and all the jets.
The choices the game gives as far as pilots and jets are concerned are very mediocre. You can pick a pilot from a pre-made collection; their attributes such as long-range visibility and G-resistance vary but you won’t notice a huge difference once you’re in-game. SO much so that, whichever pilot you do choose, it won’t affect the gameplay at all so it’s almost pointless. The jets do vary in how they perform, but their biggest differences come in arms load-out.
The environments in Over G are very bland with not much going on in them; therefore the sense of speed is pretty much gone. When you fly over the same background visible for miles, you don’t actually feel like you’re going 500mph, it almost feels like you’re standing still waiting for targets to appear on your HUD.
Over G isn’t that impressive in the graphics department. Although the jets look great in replays, they aren’t really that impressive as far as models and textures go. Some of the effects in the game do a decent job, i.e. the sun glares and the heat-haze effects, but overall this is a below-average looking game.
Your surroundings don’t look good at all and unfortunately you don’t see your enemies that close anyways. Even ground targets are very far away from you, so don’t go into this game hoping to be blown away with the visuals. On a positive note, the replays do a better job in making the game and the action look more aesthetically pleasing.
Most of the audio in the game is very realistic; from the engines through to the gun and missile fire. As is usual with racing/transport game, the engine sound changes based on which view you use, whether inside the cockpit or outside of the plane view. What really brings the sound design aspect down is the terrible voice acting, which even caused confusion for me sometimes, although I think that is due to some translation mistakes from Japanese to English.
The music is terrible in Over G; most of it is comprised of bad guitar-synthesizer type rock/metal. Maybe the game was trying to feel like the movie Top Gun from the 80’s, but it didn’t do too good of a job. If you overlook the bad music and not-so-great voice acting, the actual audio you hear while flying is pretty decent.
Over G controls are pretty simplistic in that you only need to learn how to use your throttle and how to switch weapons. There are other options like switching modes for your HUD, from navigation to attack mode, but you’ll mostly only be using your shoot button in the single-player campaign. While different planes vary on how they control, most of them seem slow and almost sluggish in the way they turn and operate; it is not fun dogfighting in this game. Although adjusting to this is no big task, this will still turn many people away from the game, as it seems that you can’t even control your plane fully.
