Air Defender – Early Access Review: Tense, Unique… and Very Much Still in the Bunker
If you’ve ever watched radar-scope footage and thought “I wish that was a game”, Air Defender is basically that fantasy turned into a real-time strategy sim.
Developed and self-published by ROTOR3, Air Defender puts you in charge of a national air defence network. You don’t fly jets yourself; instead you sit in the dark room with the big screens, watching blips move across radar and deciding who lives, who turns around, and – if you mess up – when the war starts.
It’s a fantastic premise, with atmosphere to match – but as of its Early Access launch, it’s also rough, buggy, and missing a lot of player guidance. Whether that’s acceptable will depend entirely on how much you enjoy being an unpaid tester for a very niche, very cool idea.
Command, Don’t Dogfight
Air Defender is all about command & control. From a top-down view of national airspace, you monitor radar tracks, check IFF status, compare them against flight plans, and decide when to scramble your Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) fighters.
A typical session looks like this:
- A new radar return pops up near the border.
- It’s high, fast, and not where it should be.
- You check its data, decide it’s suspicious, and launch fighters.
- Now you have to manage their fuel, weapons, and intercept geometry, often with tanker support, while other tracks start appearing elsewhere.
The game shines when you’re juggling multiple problems at once: a possible hijack, a Russian bomber probing your defences, civilian traffic threading through the chaos, and tankers trying to get into position before your fighters hit bingo fuel. When it works, it’s tense and genuinely immersive – several players compare the vibe to working in a real control and reporting centre.
The radio chatter and voiceover work are stand-out strengths: controllers, pilots, and system voices give the impression of a living, breathing command bunker, and that audio layer carries a lot of the game’s atmosphere.
Modes: Training, Combat Ready & Endless
Air Defender currently ships with a mix of training missions and a more open-ended Combat Ready / Endless experience.
- Training scenarios teach basic concepts like radar operation, track classification, and QRA intercepts. Campaign-style missions such as the “Bear” bomber intercept are meant to introduce more complex coordination, like fighter–tanker cooperation.
- Endless / Combat Ready runs are where you take what you’ve learned and try to keep the country safe as threats escalate. Let the wrong aircraft through, and things can escalate to all-out war.
On paper, it’s a solid structure. In practice, both the tutorials and scenarios are where a lot of current frustrations live.
“What Am I Supposed to Do?” – Tutorials & Learning Curve
Almost everyone agrees on one thing: the concept is brilliant, but the game does a poor job of teaching itself.
Players report struggling with very basic questions:
- How exactly does time acceleration work? The in-game help says keys like 1/2/3 should change speed, but for some people nothing happens.
- How do tankers and refuelling tracks actually function? When should you launch them, and how do you get fighters to plug in reliably instead of running out of fuel 50 miles short?
- How does the automated intercept logic behave versus manual control? Why do some intercepts succeed in tutorials but fail mysteriously in the main mode?
- Which aircraft performance envelopes are realistic, and which are hints that something is “off”? (One example players mention: a “Cessna 172” happily cruising at 35,000 feet and 500 knots.)
Several players explicitly ask for a proper manual and even an aircraft recognition guide that includes max altitude, speed, and typical profiles for civilian and military types. Right now there are tutorial videos and some in-game help, but many feel the explanation doesn’t go nearly far enough.
The result is that newer players often feel punished for making what seem like reasonable decisions. You flag an obviously unrealistic “Cessna” as hostile – only to be told you were wrong. You get informed that Russia is attacking, but you’re not sure what buttons to press next. That confusion drains tension and replaces it with simple frustration.
For a game that aims to simulate high-stakes real-world processes, strong onboarding and documentation are crucial, and right now Air Defender hasn’t nailed that yet.
Bugs in the Battlespace
This is Early Access, and the game is upfront about still being in development. But the current build has some fairly serious issues, many of them reported repeatedly by the community.
A few of the more common ones:
Training mission scripting problems
In the “Smarties” training mission, players report that turning on the L11 system doesn’t work; the right-click panel becomes unresponsive.
In the “Bear” mission, certain actions (other than classification) can suddenly flip a track to “hostile”, causing QRA fighters to shoot down what should be a non-threat aircraft.
Tanker behaviour
Tankers sometimes fail to reach their planned track before fighters run dry, making the Bear mission feel impossible even when you react promptly.
- Reassigning tankers to new tracks can cause them to freeze with speed 0 while still at cruise altitude, or go off on strange “sightseeing tours” instead of following orders.
Redeploy commands only work some of the time; other times the tanker just sits there doing nothing.
Asset deployment quirks
Deploying assets that require clicking on a track can place the first waypoint wherever the map happens to be centred, forcing redeployment.
There are reports of “order two tankers, get five in the air,” which is funny the first time and less so when you’re trying to manage a clean scenario.
Stuck or invisible aircraft
Fighters set to RTB can end up hovering above the airbase at 0 knots and never actually land.
Some players report QRA launches confirmed in the UI… but no actual aircraft appearing in the sky.
State bleed between profiles
Creating a new profile and starting Combat Ready can sometimes load remnants of the previous game’s situation: old tanker designations, emergency markers, even enemy spawns reappearing in the same spot.
On top of this, multiple people mention time compression not working, UI elements disappearing (such as the bottom command bar), and some missions not recognising completion even when the player has fulfilled the objectives.
None of these are impossible to fix – they’re exactly the kind of issues Early Access can iron out – but right now they make certain training missions and strategies feel unreliable or outright broken.
UI & Accessibility: Great Look, Tough to Read
Visually, Air Defender looks clean and professional. The radar map, contact symbology, and UI framing sell the idea that you’re working in a real operations room, and several players simply call the game “beautiful.”
However, there are two big pain points:
4K and high-resolution displays
On 4K monitors, the UI can become unreadably small, with no in-game option to scale the interface. Some players say they simply can’t play in its current state because they can’t read the text or buttons.Audio balance
The Master Controller voice is reported as being three to four times louder than other voices and effects. That’s immersive the first time, less so when your ears are getting blasted every time they speak.
The game already offers some accessibility-related options like difficulty and volume controls, so there’s clearly an intention to cater to a wider range of players. Extending that effort to proper UI scaling and better default audio mixing would go a long way.
Scenario Design & Replayability
Right now, some players feel that Combat Ready / Endless runs are too predictable:
- The same initial tanker routes.
- The same suspicious 707, the same tracks in the northwest.
- Similar timings each run.
Combined with bugs that make tanker operations unreliable and leave little time to deploy assets or execute your own strategy, it can feel like you’re being pushed down a narrow scripted path rather than wrestling with a dynamic air picture.
There’s a lot of community appetite for:
- Longer, more free-form peace-to-war escalations.
- Greater variation between runs.
- More room to plan your own tanker layout and defensive posture before the storm hits.
Again, this is exactly the kind of content that can grow over time – but at launch, the sandbox side of Air Defender feels limited compared to the richness implied by its premise.
Price, Community & Developer Responsiveness
At its current price point, opinions on value are split:
- Some players are already in love with the concept and atmosphere, happily calling it one of the most interesting sims they’ve played in years, and they’re excited to see it grow.
- Others feel that in its current state it’s “little more than a buggy tech demo” and too expensive compared to other Early Access titles, especially in less affluent regions.
On the positive side, there are concrete examples of the developer responding quickly to feedback – including adjusting regional pricing after community complaints, which one reviewer specifically praised and then edited their review to positive.
The developer also engages with the community, and for a niche simulation like this, that relationship will be crucial.
Verdict – Who Is Air Defender For Right Now?
Air Defender is one of those games where the idea alone is enough to make certain players instantly curious:
- You like the AWACS / GCI side of hardcore flight sims more than the actual flying.
- You’re into command-style military sims, but you’d love something more focused and atmospheric.
- The thought of tracking tens of aircraft at once while trying not to accidentally start a war sounds… fun.
If that’s you, Air Defender already “scratches the brain in a pleasing way,” as one player put it. The core loop of identifying, classifying and intercepting traffic over a living airspace really does feel unique.
However:
- If you’re allergic to bugs, broken scripts, and unclear mechanics, you will be frustrated.
- If you expect polished tutorials, clear documentation, and UI scaling for 4K, you’ll likely want to wait.
- If you need your money to buy a finished, content-rich strategy game today, this isn’t that yet.
For now, Air Defender is best thought of as a promising operations-room sim prototype with a strong foundation and lots of rough edges. If you’re excited by the concept and happy to help shape it – and you go in with true Early Access expectations – it’s absolutely one to watch and maybe to support early.
If not, keep it on your radar. If the developer can tighten the tutorials, squash the tanker and mission bugs, improve accessibility, and expand scenario variety, Air Defender could grow into something genuinely special in the air-defence niche.
Comments (0)