Tinker Pilot Early Access Impressions: Tweakness Is Its Strength

Customization is the name of the game in Tinker Pilot, where everything in the cockpit is literally up for grabs – even if there’s not a whole lot beyond it.

Tinker Pilot is a curious thing. It starts with the name, of course, which, just so we’re clear, refers to the fact that you can move and tweak everything around you in your virtual cockpit so that you have your controls just so. Ideally that means having them represented in game just how they exist in physical space, whether they are on a desk, duct taped to the arms of your dining room chair, or you happen to own a fully tricked out motion rig that marks you out as a valid target for online jealousy. ‘Tinker’ absolutely does not refer to you being an itinerant mender of housewares, which is the definition of the word that first comes to my 16th Century-attuned mind.

The piloting part of the name needs less of an explanation. Unfortunately, while the gameplay is smooth, the controls tight and the sense of being a bad-ass space jock is initially palpable, there isn’t much of a game to actually talk about. There are a handful of scenarios that between them offer some semblance of progression, but it feels like it was put together to showcase the extent of the customization you can perform, and thus the degree of control you have over your nimble ship. As such, the missions prioritise speed and maneuverability above all things, and drama and narrative barely at all.

After a tutorial, during which you’ll take out a couple of crates in an asteroid field, you’ll jump to the surface of a desert world to blow up some drones, then the final scenario, which is a classic time trial through some hoops. Truth be told there’s less than an hour of content here and it’s not a particularly thrilling way to pass the time either. There is an online leaderboard, so if “getting gud” appeals, you might be able to squeeze more enjoyment from it than I was able to.

The only area where Tinker Pilot feels substantial enough to justify its early access price is back where we began, making the cockpit your very own. You can move button panels around, choose from a wide range of controllers to replace the virtual sticks – essentially allowing you to copy your current physical set-up so that it exists in-game, or create one anew that is perfectly attuned to the way you like to play or any accessibility needs you might have. As is often the case when such levels of fine tuning is offered, it can be a fiddly and time-consuming process, but on the intersection between space combat and interior design, Tinker Pilot is unrivalled. A recent patch even allows telemetry data to be exported, although I’m not sure how useful such a feature is for most VR users.

It’s worth noting that if you lack the high-end controls requisite to space combatry – namely a joystick – the virtual controls here work really well. Normally I find them terrible. In fact, until playing Tinker Pilot I was of the opinion that they could only be terrible, but this game nails its default controls very well. Partly for two reasons, I think. One is that sticks aren’t given a physical representation, they are displayed as holographic, which means your brain isn’t being tricked and thus you subconsciously don’t expect or indeed miss the lack of any haptic feedback when wiggling them about. The other aspect is that the degree of travel needed to affect any movement in 3D space is very small. Small twitches of the wrist are all that’s required, which means you don’t get nearly as tired as you might in other games pretending they are doing things they’re not.

Sadly, despite nailing the control side of things, Tinker Pilot is almost entirely lacking in entertainment. It’s all well and good to be able to move button panels about and have your shiny new VKB Gladiator rendered before you, but there are fans of the genre – myself among them – who are happy to operate within whatever cockpit the designer has created. Just as I don’t need to move the climate controls in my car, or have the steering column set six inches lower, I’m usually fine with how things are. I’ll either get used to them or play something else, which has been my experience with every first-person spaceship game I’ve played. Sure, some cockpits are more conveniently arranged than others, which is especially true in VR, but it’s never bothered me that only one game to my knowledge, 1986’s Academy, has given me the option to move things around. (If you can think of any others, put them in the comments below.)

It’s a cliche to say it, but Tinker Pilot feels like a tech demo looking for someone to turn it into a game. What missions exist are designed first and foremost around promoting the degree of control and maneuverability the game systems allow. There’s no attempt at world-building, there’s no storyline, no meaningful sense of progression, it’s essentially a showcase; the kind of vertical slice that a developer would take to publishers or patreon to show the kind of thing that could be done with either a team, a budget, or both. There’s a framework to greatness here, no doubt, but I would urge interested parties to seek more evidence of there being a greater emphasis on in-game piloting and less perhaps on future tinkering before parting with their disposable income.