Flying Soldiers Review (Nintendo Switch)

Review code used, with many thanks to Wild Sphere.

In this puzzle, and strategy game Flying Soldiers from developers Wild Sphere you need to be ready to command an odd squad of little birds and bring them back safely to the end of the battlefield.

Little Budgies Take Flight

In Flying Soldiers, each level consists of a miniature linear obstacle course and it’s your goal to get the birds from start to finish all in one piece. Your little tin-hatted budgie squad trundle blindly forward with a single-minded focus into all sorts of danger. They remind me of Lemmings in their single-mindedness advancing of the course in Flying Soldiers. If you aren’t successful in helping the squad overcome various obstacles such as pits, spikes and other things deadly to budgies, they disappear in a flurry of feathers.

Flying Soldiers. LadiesGamers — No, little guy stay away from the bomb!

You are shown the course the budgies will traverse at the start of each level. You can move the camera freely up and down the length of the course to work out where to place the object on a grid-based track to adjust the budgies course.

Help The Budgies To The End

Through the use of angled barriers, which can be flipped left or right to alter their direction, springboards are used to propel your feathered soldiers over treacherous gaps and walls of spikes, as their wings are tiny so they can’t fly far.

And speed boosts to give them a running start to clear some of the pits, and a host of other place-able objects. The budgies can jump though not far without some help and flap their flightless wings to hover over all manner of hazardous materials. Along the way, you can collect medals for the secondary objectives.

Be Careful In Placing Objects

Each level has an edit mode where you get to survey the landscape and place and adjust everything you think will guide the birds to safety. You only have a set amount of objects to place so you need to be careful you don’t run out of ramps or springboards. Once you let them out of their cage there isn’t any stopping your squad. They are immediately on their march, the game takes control away from the player, except for a retry and fast-forward button.

As you progress new bird breeds will also become available, which offer new abilities such as swimming across water or crashing through certain barriers. Getting all birds safely to the goal is enough to advance, but more advanced players will also get a lot out of collecting three medals in each level that are typically placed in hard to reach spots.

Throughout the 45 missions with increasingly harder level designs, as new objects are introduced, keeps the game a little fresh for the player and those poor flightless budgies!

To place objects on the levels you use a tool selecting wheel. I found this can be a bit unruly and fiddly to pick objects from. But other than that I hadn’t any problems with the game.

Visuals and Controls

I quite like the look of the game, with cut-scenes and loading posters that invoke thoughts of an old World War II-era aesthetic, and with a grainy film off faded artwork that suits the style of the game. It’s pretty simplistic but gets the job done.

Flying Soldiers has a military soundtrack, it’s not fantastic by any means but again it’s suitable for the game. It can get a little repetitive on listening to it for a while, that’s where the volume button comes in to play as I turned the sound down.

Controlling the game for the most part it works fine, though I feel it could be a little more fine-tuned. Especially when it comes to picking objects from the tool selecting wheel as I’ve mentioned.

Conclusion

I had fun with Flying Soldiers, it’s an entertaining puzzle game with hints of strategy in selecting where to place the objects to help the budgies reach the end of the run.

It’s not a long game but it is a pleasant enough to get a few hours of fun out of in-between something more serious and little more challenging.

Final Verdict: I Like It