With just my mouse I was barrel rolling and making g-force-filled turns at incredible speeds while blasting my foes out of the sky. Surprisingly, I couldn’t have been more relaxed. Afterburn was really good at putting me in a relaxed trance, even as the skies filled with enemies wanting to kill me.
Afterburn is a new game from developer Morfeo, the same developer who created a little mod some of you may have heard called The Specialists. In Afterburn, players take to the sky in a fighter jet. Each of the three jet types has a unique weapon and alternate versions that allow players to find a jet that fits their preferred playstyle.
The game offers the ability to use an Xbox controller for gameplay, but I was able to play the game just fine with the mouse. It sounds weird to say that I can play a fighter jet game just using a mouse, but Afterburn makes it work.
With simple, arcade-like mechanics, Afterburn necessitates one mouse button for shooting, the other for barrel-rolling and accelerating depending on where the reticle is on the screen. That’s all there is to the controls.
The game’s simplicity is not a downfall. Once you learn the basics you’ll want to start seeing your name rise in the online leaderboards. Each day a new mission is available for players to undertake and compete in to see who can get the highest score for that day. The leaderboards are populated with hundreds of players, so there is plenty of competition to be had.
Thanks to not needing to be hunched over a keyboard with one hand tapping the WASD dance, I was able to sit back a bit and relax in my chair — something I’m rarely able to do with PC games. While the gameplay is quick and requires focus, I was never stressed while playing it. The enemies, while vicious, aren’t the smartest, so dodging and outmaneuvering them was easy enough.
The difficulty, for me, came with finishing the objectives by the time the mission’s clock runs out. You get time added for killing enemies, but if you spend too long chasing enemy aircraft in endless loop-dee-loops, you’ll run out of time and fail the mission. Some of the objectives require flying to stationary objects, like satellite dishes, to destroy them. I found that sometimes these objectives would spawn so far away that I’d run out of time before I got to them.
Playing Afterburn was enjoyable for me because there are only a few mechanics to learn and the game requires enough focus where I don’t have to worry about becoming bored or daydreaming like I would in a more casual game.
I could easily see people playing Afterburn on stream while waiting for a group to assemble or in between matches that have long queues. Those of you who enjoy chasing high scores will have plenty of competition, and those of you (like me) who just want to relax with a straightforward arcade game will find enjoyment in Afterburn.
Afterburn was reviewed using a retail copy provided by the developer.
