This obsessively detailed rocket flight sim finally lets me cause historic spaceflight disasters from the comfort of my own home
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.
Reentry is, more or less, a flight sim, insofar as belting yourself into a missile is a kind of flight. It's one of those grognardy flight sims, too. No arcade-y get-up-and-go here; your craft's panels vibrate with twiddly switches and inscrutable gauges. Successful flight, when you come to it, relies on you completing an exhaustive series of checklists: does the radio work? Does the radio work at ultra-high frequency? Does it work at low-power ultra-high frequency? Does it work at high frequency (non-ultra edition)?
Repeat this for every big, bright button on your board.
Or you can wait out the launch countdown, smack a few buttons around, and marvel as your rocket lifts off and immediately separates, sending your poor little pod cratering back down, and then through, the surface of the Earth, where it will remain rotating forever in what NASA scientists refer to as the phantom zone.
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.
2026 games: All the upcoming games
Best PC games: Our all-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together