Humble have launched their winter sale, and to kick it off you can grab strategy-management game Bomber Crew for free until January 16th. Plus there are loads of substantial discounts on other great games.

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Bomber Crew was already a bit FTL-like, and its sequel is leaning in. Space Crew swaps the original’s World War 2 setting for outer space, but otherwise still looks to be a strategy game about telling your vessel’s crew what to do as you launch missiles and catch fire. The announcement trailer can be found below.

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Chocks/bombs away! The mildly FTL-ish game Bomber Crew unleashed its first payload of DLC last Friday, sending a new mini-campaign, bomber upgrades and experimental enemy fighter craft plummeting down to the earth below.

That new campaign takes place in the winter of 1944, during the “Big Week” that paved the way for the land invasion of continental Europe. The real-life series of missions is also known as “Operation Argument”, which I much prefer – apparently Operation Passive Aggression and Operation Quibble just couldn’t get the job done.

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Released in the eye of the silly season storm, and crucially getting in there before the bigger, noisier World War Twos of Wolfenstein and COD arrived, Runner Duck Games’ airborne “strategic survival sim” Bomber Crew has done the business. Its success has far outstripped the expectations of this two-person Brighton studio; as such, its co-designer and artist Dave Miller tells me, “we’ve got plans for the franchise which we will now definitely be able to do.”

In the far future, there’ll be another game that is “not just the obvious thing”, but ahead of that, a bunch of free updates followed by three clumps of DLC – one of which is something the game’s audience has been clamouring for. Bomber Crew will quite likely continue to be the Memphis Belle of the ball. (more…)

I’m going to tell you about the time my Bomber Crew accidentally dropped a food parcel on Birmingham. But first, a tragic tale.

A spitfire has gone down somewhere in the English Channel and it falls to my crew to rescue the pilot who is bobbing around in the water. We’ll need to fend off enemy fighters while dumping survival packs into the water in the pilot’s vicinity, but I’m new to this Bomber Crew lark and oh no one of our wings is on fire, and I think our plane is going into the drink. At least the spitfire pilot has some wreckage to cling to. Job done, I guess?

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There are various ways to make a war game realistic. Battlefront do it with blue-chip ballistics and subtle spotting mechanics, Panther Games with plausible AI and plenty of command friction, Eagle Dynamics with sophisticated flight models and painstakingly reproduced avionics. We Are Muesli built Venti Mesi with the help of real Milanese memories and the free WW2 ‘narrative docu-game’ is incredibly powerful as a result. (more…)

Bomber Crew is warming its engines and waggling its flight control surfaces. On Oct 19th, if all goes to plan, a green Very light will fizz heavenward and anyone with TBA to spare will get the chance to find out whether Runner Duck’s 3D-FTL-with-Lancasters is W for Wizard or S for Shite. The evening I’ve just spent with the single-mission sliver of preview code suggests the game will generate far more compliments than complaints, but won’t fully satisfy fans of No Moon Tonight and B-17: Queen of the Skies. (more…)

Greying temples? Check>. Mortgage? Check>. Fond of Werther’s Originals and New Tricks? Check>.

Gosh, according to recently issued Home Office guidelines I’m now qualified to grumble about things like soft prison sentences, the inexorable decline in the quality of pop music, and scandalous gaps in the National Curriculum. If I wanted to I could begin a review of the latest Athena-engined wargame by wagging a finger at a state education system that allows subjects of Good Queen Bess II to leave school knowing next to nothing about one of the most traumatic episodes in British history. (more…)

Flying missions in the upcoming strat-o-sim Bomber Crew [official site] is quite cartoony, in that you can do things like send crew members out on your World War 2 bomber’s wing to fix a burning engine. It’s also quite complex and serious, in that your plane can get duffed up enough to need to do that and you’ll die terribly if not. Bomber Crew looks a little like FTL but with more sim-y underpinnings, and it looks a right lark. Publishers Curve Digital today announced that they’ve picked Runner Duck’s game up and will be publishing it on October 19th. Have a look: (more…)