Bomber Crew

Bomber Crew puts players in charge of seven named airmen aboard a WWII heavy bomber, sending them on missions where a single well-placed enemy round can knock out an engine, start a fire, or take out a gunner — and every one of those crises needs a specific crew member ordered to the right station to fix it before the whole plane goes down. Released in October 2017, it built a Very Positive following — 88.5% across 6,615 English reviews — around a genuinely tense premise. Reading through the review sample reveals a game whose core idea nearly everyone agrees works, paired with a specific, repeated set of complaints about the interface built to execute it.

Real, earned tension

The praise across the sample centers on exactly the feeling the design is chasing. One reviewer calls it "very fun, challenging at times" and says it "scratches one very particular itch in my brain," crediting proper micromanagement and strategic upgrades with mitigating the game's harsher swings. Another, more self-aware about the frustration involved, puts it bluntly: "even though this game rage baits the s*** out of me every time I play it, it is SOOOOOOO fun." That combination — genuine, repeated frustration paired with genuine, repeated enjoyment — recurs often enough across the sample to treat as an accurate description of what the game is actually like to play, not a contradiction to resolve one way or the other.

An interface reviewers say fights back

The most specific, most convergent criticism concerns the crew-selection interface itself. One detailed reviewer describes the exact failure mode: "I lost count of the amount of times I was trying to select a member of the crew to do some repairs and the game then let me (accidentally) select the pilot and take him out of the cockpit. You'll do this a lot in the heat of battle and it shouldn't be possible." That's a specific, reproducible-sounding interface flaw, not a vague complaint about difficulty, and it directly undermines the exact kind of precise crew management the game's design depends on. A second reviewer raises a related but distinct issue: "Claims to have Full Controller support yet it actually doesn't" — a concrete, checkable discrepancy between advertised features and what ships.

A tutorial that stops too soon

A separate, recurring complaint concerns onboarding. One detailed reviewer states it plainly: "The tutorial explains the basics, but the game really fails to explain the rest as you progress. The UI is awful especially for the crowded, small space, which makes most of the game tedious." That's a familiar shape to a pattern seen elsewhere in games this size: a genuinely deep simulation whose own introduction doesn't scale with its actual complexity, leaving players to piece together systems through trial and error rather than through anything the game itself teaches.

A harshness that divides its own fans

The single mechanical complaint raised most vividly concerns how catastrophic small failures can be. One reviewer's account is representative: "I get it start the game, doing really well, about to beat the whole campaign, but then i lose a gear, A SINGLE GEAR. and i go in for landing, the whole thing explodes, everyone dies, my whole game is ruined." A separate, more detailed review frames the same shape of experience without the frustration, treating it as the point: "Your crew get shot to pieces, your engines turn into fireballs... you are kicked back to day 1 with vanilla gear and crew... All the above happens in the blink of an eye." Global achievement data confirms this isn't an exaggeration — completion falls steadily from 75% on the tutorial mission down to under 9% for the campaign's final mission, a curve steep enough to back up both readings: real difficulty that some players find exactly the right kind of hard, and others find disproportionate to the actual mistakes that trigger it.

A community still asking for more

One detail worth including as a positive signal about lasting engagement: years after launch, reviewers are still actively requesting expanded content rather than treating the game as a closed chapter. One recent review lists specific, informed requests — playable Ju-88s, He-111s, B-24s, B-25s, B-26s, and B-29s, plus the option to fly for the USSR, Italy, or Germany rather than only the RAF and USAAF campaigns already included. That kind of specific, engaged wishlist, appearing in reviews written well after the base game and its one DLC expansion had already shipped, is a good sign the core loop still holds real appeal for genre enthusiasts, even if Runner Duck's own post-launch content plan ultimately stopped at the two campaigns currently available.

A softlock worth flagging plainly

One further specific technical complaint deserves its own mention: at least one reviewer reports getting stuck entirely mid-mission, with their AI-controlled navigator "going around in circles without the objectives" rather than progressing. This review found no way to independently confirm how common or fixable this specific bug is, but a reported softlock is worth noting distinctly from the broader difficulty and interface complaints above, since it describes the game failing to function as intended rather than simply being harsh by design.

Verdict

Bomber Crew's central idea — real stakes, real named crew, real permadeath tension across a physically simulated bomber — earns its Very Positive reception honestly, and even its harshest critics tend to describe genuine engagement rather than boredom. What keeps it from a stronger recommendation is a specific, convergent set of interface problems: a crew-selection system several reviewers say actively works against precise play in combat, an advertised controller feature that doesn't function as claimed, and a tutorial that undersells how much the game will eventually ask of new players. Go in for the tension; expect to fight the UI almost as often as you fight the enemy.

Sources: Steam store page and appdetails API (release date, pricing, platform data); Steam's aggregate review data (query_summary totals, English-language sample); individually read user reviews, both positive and negative, sorted by helpfulness and recency; Steam's global achievement statistics API.