FPV Labs - Drone Simulator

TL;DR: If you dont like tryp, you definitely won't like this game because it shares a lot in common with it, and I suggest you holding off buying this. Game's still wonky here and there, but there are a few nice features specific to this game. Overall I rate this game maybe 25/100 in its current state and the price is brutal for what its worth atm even though I think drone sims are kind of absurdly cheap in the modern economy for what they're worth generally. I'd recommend this game if the current state was a free demo, it shouldn'y be $30 but for the price point it's a hard not recommended from me. But that doesn't mean I won't play it, I'll get my money's worth out of this one one way or another. THIS REVIEW IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE. Here are some of the good stuff: * Only drone sim I've played so far that has this many configuraiton controls for battery simulation * Looks good if you upscale or render at 150%+ resolution and squint your eyes to ignore the aliasing of shrubbery alike (I recommend turning down your graphics and increasing upscale for the best of both worlds as with every other unreal engine drone sim with fisheye postfx) * Supports ray tracing without mandatory temporal anti aliasing methods * Nice UI but a little weird how they seperated some of the options from each other * Decent (but arguably unpolished) sound design * Somewhat simplified physics tuning (compared to tryp) * Detailed environments for their primary focus bandos (better than Tryp) Lengthy review: Needs more parameters to feel realistic (e.g. frame lift on X/Y/Z axis seperately, motor distance from centre of mass etc.) Quad pids feel way too perfect even with a lot of gyro noise injection despite their very low D-terms and no feedforward. There is motor delay effects, I recommend setting it to a very high value like 50-150ms to get a decent feel but it's not a perfect solution. While there is a tiny whoop setup, the physical boundry box model is still a 5 inch It's ERA Like pretty much every other drone sim out there, fisheye lens effect is a post fx so you need to turn up the render resolution it still struggles to give a clear image at 150% render scale. Game also needs better model LoD management, there's too much bush aliasing in general Battery sag also doesn't feel right (irl my amp draw reduces with reduced capacity remaining, but here it actually increases to compensate for voltage loss) but currently the most advanced and configurable one I've tried. There is no motor torque strain effect when fighting ongoing air, but there is the opposite of it being thrust loss effect at high speed. Currently at time of this review there's a small-ish size map basedw on the famous large rudersdorf bando and bando near wohwinkel, which is much larger. Some parameters are mislabelled like jello is actually just camera shake for when in propwash etc, it doesnt give you actual jello effects. Input latency metric isn't accurate so you can't rely on it. Touching an object at low speed also launches you into an excessively chaotic spin and is hardly saveable but if you crash into the arms at high speed I think it looks realistic despite what other people say. But I hate that motor sounds instantly ramp up to 100% while it stabilises the quad. Graphics-wise this game is somewhat poorly optimised but it's roughly on the same-ish level of Tryp.FPV so if you can run that game, you can run this with equivalent settings. Unlike other games however, I think this is the first to feature ray tracing. TAA haters rejoice! - You can disable anti aliasing and enjoy the speckled rays in full glory! As good as this map looks it really only looks good in the central bando areas. The further out you go the more shoddy it looks, like roads are literally copy pasted rectangular segments that you can sometimes fly under as if this is uncrashed map quality. Water effects looks really good but no refraction effects. Sound engineering is great (but I think Tryp.FPV is more refined), but motor sounds are actually kinda terrible (By far I think velocidrone has best motor sounds in any drone sim currently) _______________________ Currently, this game should be priced at $5-8 ($8-10 in aud, the game is $30 in australia) at most for early access in its current state. My review can change in the future when this game improves. I'm kinda tempted to refund but for now I'll keep the game and wait to see how it progresses as I want to support the developer to see where this goes as it shows promise and I can tell a lot of hard work went into making this. But I'm also afraid this will become "just another Tryp.FPV" like game in that multiplayer/map making probably won't come anytime soon and this ends up as a game you will touch once a month or season for a couple of hours to check for updates or on a whim.