The thing they don’t tell you is: it’s easy, this astronaut lark. Oh, sure, they make it look hard—all dials and knobs and switches that have protective covers over them, but it’s just theatre. Easiest job in the world, really: you just go up.
Such was my attitude when I fired up Reentry – A Space Flight Simulator—a videogame you know is good because it kicks off with archival audio of John F Kennedy—but it was an attitude I was quickly disabused of.
If nothing else, you come away with a renewed appreciation for what a huge assemblage of systems rockets are. I mean, yes, I knew they were complicated: it’s rocket science, but when I think of spaceflight I tend to picture things like, well, engines—great jets of fire, and vapour drifting off a rocket in berth. I imagine them as monolithic, not as the great, complicated gestalts they actually are. Well, consider me educated.
Honestly? It’s a genuinely impressive thing that’s clearly been created by absolute spaceflight sickos. Your pod interior is painstakingly modelled on real spacecraft, switches flip with pleasing mid-century kerthunks, and every so often authentic historical audio will chime in, to endow you with a sense of destiny and purpose as you accidentally jettison your retros somewhere over Connecticut.
Is it for everyone? Absolutely not. It’s a technical flight sim made for the rocket-obsessed rather than the plane-crazy (though there is a deal of fun to be had hitting a few buttons at random and seeing how bad things can do), but if you were one of those kids who had big books of rockets growing up, it’s a dream come true.
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