Bomber Crew

A cute game of crew management.

Overview

In Bomber Crew, you send your plane out to do bombing missions in WW2 Western Europe. Most encounters involve trying to destroy a ground target while being harassed by enemy fighters. Most tasks are pretty simple but the meat of the game comes when you need to do too many things at once. 

Various Mechanics

Management

For the most part, your seven crew members do not need to be managed. When everything is going well, very little interaction is required. The stress of the game comes when problems arise. If the electrical system goes out, you need to order someone to repair it, then later order him back to his station. When a lot of things go wrong at the same time, it is overwhelming. Two gunners run out of ammo, the mechanic needs medical attention, an engine catches fire, and you are passing over your bombing target -- what do you do? This stress brilliantly captures the feel of "long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror", although without the boredom.

RPG

Your crew gains levels, you buy equipment, you unlock new stuff, you improve your airplane. The RPG elements could be improved, but they aren't bad for such a simple game.

Permadeath

The game is a little awkward when you lose your plane and crew. Instead of losing the game, you get replacements. These replacements are fairly well leveled, but likely weaker than what you had. This means that death just makes the game harder until you can recover. However, it makes me lose the connection I feel with my crew. Losing your plane is fairly easy to do.

Mechanics That Don't Work Well

This game has some cool mechanics that don't really play well.

Parachutes: In practice, it is rare to be in a situation where you need parachutes and have time to use them. Earlier in the game, medkits are far more useful.

Item Unlocks: This just feels clunky to me. Why not have everything unlocked from the beginning but be cost prohibitive? 

Survival Skills: If you plane goes down behind enemy lines, your crewmen might survive. That's cool and all, but it wasn't an important part of the game. My crew are far more likely to die during a mission. This mechanic should either be magnified or removed.

Crew Advancement: This is a huge missed opportunity. You only have one set of crew, they have unique roles, and death is reasonably frequent. When a crewman dies, you recruit a replacement. When a crewman is wounded, he is ready for the next battle. This isn't bad, but with a few tweaks, it could have been a really fun system of recruitment and training, similar to XCom. You could maintain backup crew that slowly gain levels from training. On easy missions you could swap some of your backup crew to give them more xp. With a full backup crew, losing your primary crew wouldn't hurt, but if you then lost your backup crew that could signal the end of the game. Forcing wounded crew to lose a few missions while they recover would make for interesting strategic choices. The frustrating thing is that all of those system almost exist -- crew gets wounded, there is a screen for recruitment, etc.

Other Annoyances

• Ordering the crew is often awkward. If a wounded guy is next to a turret, clicking in the area might heal the crew, man the turret, or just stand there doing nothing.
• Not enough feedback for who is selected. You are ordering people around but didn't realize you had the pilot selected? The ship starts to plummet.
• Selecting things is difficult. I've lost a few missions because I simply couldn't convince the crewman to pick up a medkit. I still haven't figured this out, even after asking Google.
• Parts of the plane are difficult to access. The inner port engine is hard to click on. The bomber station is hard to click on while doing an emergency dive. 

Should You Buy It

Despite the complaints, I do recommend Bomber Crew. It is cheap, easy to get into, and fun. It has some depth and replayability. I didn't finish the campaign, but someone with more patience, a faster brain, or the willingness to save-cheat would not have any problems.