Pilot Down: Behind Enemy Lines review

Ah, the joys of being sent rubbish review code. It’s situations such as this where I have to commend Harry’s position on this site as Editor. Without him I would never have had the opportunity to suffer such delights as Pilot Down: Behind Enemy Lines.

My afternoon could have been spent playing wonderful games like Fahrenheit or Burnout Revenge. It was instead spent ploughing through one of the most monumentally broken games I’ve ever encountered.
Am I bitter? Is this irony you’re reading? You bet your arse it isn’t. So, dear reader, I dedicate this lovely number to the wonder that is Harry...

Pilot Down

You’re US Airman Bill Foster. Your B-24 Liberator was shot down during a routine bomb run over Germany in the winter of 1944. Alone in no mans land (or Nazi occupied soil), your job is to find a way back home – evading countless soldiers along the way.

That’s actually a decent idea for a game. Instead of the octane-fuelled Medal of Honor and Call of Duty games, Pilot Down aims to be a cross between Metal Gear Solid, Splinter Cell and XIII. The idea is to sneak out of Germany, not to shoot your way out.

But what the game aspires to be and what it ultimately is are two different things. Make no mistake: this is no Metal Gear Solid. This is no Splinter Cell. This is no XIII. This isn’t even remotely current-gen stuff we’re dealing with here.

Stealth

Pilot Down has an abundance of problems. It’s just hard to know which ones to list more than others. OK, let’s break this down and go over it bit by bit, shall we? As a stealth game Pilot Down fails because your enemies are about as intelligent as a cup of coffee.

They respond to the sounds of you running, which means much of your time will be spent sneaking around. You can knock on certain cover to get a patrolling guard to come and investigate – thus giving you ample time to either sneak past him or break his neck.

With the use of packets of cigarettes you can also lure guards from their patrol routes. But this merely proves a superfluous detail, as it’s something you’ll rarely end up using. The game is so easy and the enemy AI so preposterously bad you’ll have no problems at all. Which leads me to...

Artificial Intelligence

...or lack thereof. These guys are truly dumb. Not only is their aim way off, even at point blank, they also don’t seem to mind you popping their buddy standing only twenty feet away. And if they do respond they hardly prove threatening.

There are too many examples to list regarding how utterly asinine these enemies are, but we’ll give you a couple anyway. One of the levels tasks Bill with lowering the water levels at a dock facility. There are enemies posted on two separate floors – all in clear site. The room is big, but a gunshot would echo tremendously.

Aiming from the top level on two guards beneath me, I shot one in the head and watched as his buddy proceeded to run to the nearest cover. That cover happened to be a large box below me to the right. Fair enough, except he decided to hide on the side directly facing me.

Earlier, at a section where you have to lower a piece of cargo to traverse a bridge, you first have to find the keys to use the crane. Two soldiers are standing by the sea, talking. I crept up behind them and popped one in the head. His fellow soldier didn’t even flinch.

I shot him. He flinched, but didn’t move. I shot him again. He flinched, but didn’t move. I shot him again, and he died. The cover was hardly worth the effort of sneaking up to because if the soldier turned I’d have probably had a bit of a fight. But he didn’t. Which leads me to...

Interacting with the World

...or, once again, the lack thereof. The only way you are capable of interacting with the world is through an interface stolen via Splinter Cell. By approaching certain items of devices a set of options appears in the top right of the screen. Do you pick up the item, leave it or combine it with something?

Most of the time it’s ammo or health. But there are situations that call for a little key collecting. This is a term used to describe a game normally fitting the survival horror genre. By finding a wooden mallet, for example, your able to hit a peg on a crane that drops Hitler’s brand new car into the Rhine.

Other times you need a key for this or that door, or a fishing rod to find this or that key. It’s horribly basic stuff that serve’s to highlight the games biggest fault: there is absolutely nothing next- or current-gen about it.

It looks and feels like a PS1 game. Now that’s a hard thing for a console that is more than three times the power of its predecessor to do. But spend half an hour with Pilot Down and that becomes apparent in all areas.

And that’s the reason I’m in such high spirits. Pilot Down took me back to the halcyon days of the PS1. I was young again. But I wasn’t as naïve to think a piece of crap like Pilot Down had merit. It doesn’t. It’s a bad, bad, bad game.