What is the best NON-plane/jet/craft 3D flying game?

Uh... Zone of the Enders? Kinda sorta?

Very curious about 3D flight mechanics in non-plane/craft games, but I can't think of any outside Superman and Iron Man games (which tend to be not sweet).

I'll accept regular ass 3rd person games with a flight ability/sequence as well.

Pre-emptive thanks.

I always got Fly for my movement power in City of Heroes. Even though it was technically the slowest of the bunch, it was just fun being able to fly and hover all over the place. Plus when you really needed it it was a great oh shit I need to get out of here power to just go straight up so enemies couldn't hit you.

Shattered Horizon gets my vote, assuming drifting around in spacesuits counts as "flying" (I think it's way cooler, so there's that also)

I seem to be drawing a blank on everything but Dark Void. You had a Jetpack. It was alright, but not too hot. I remember it being quite fun when you actually got to fly around an area, but I could be misremebering if it was good or not.

@crusader8463: Ahhh! Can't believe I missed that one. I played CoH a bunch in its early days. Flight was awesome in that game. I don't remember if there was flight combat though. Was there? Or movement only?

@dudeglove, @killerfridge: You know I bought Dark Void from a bin for 6 bucks but couldn't even play through to the point you get the jetpack (10-30 mins). Maybe I'll reinstall that...

@giantstalker: Never heard of this game! Sweet. Off to look it up.. OK, so yeah, not really the "flight" I had in mind but still, pretty interesting. If the price is right maybe I'll give it a look.

Magic Carpet

blast from the past right over here

@geraltitude: Ya there was. You could get Hover at level 6 and that gave you a small defensive buff and allowed you to move around in combat. It was pretty slow for many years, but they eventually buffed it up some and if you allocated a couple fly enhancements into it instead of going for the tiny defensive buff you could zip around as fast as you were with sprint active. Near the end when they added enhancement sets that gave you buffs for having certain sets of them you could get that thing zipping around like crazy. On a joke build one time I speced it in such a way that it was almost as fast as fly. Made those small maps funny.

Kid Icarus on the 3DS?

This game made me want to vomit =(

Does zero-g gameplay count as flying? Dead Space 2 and 3; also, Crysis.

The Harry Potter games that allowed you to fly around Hogwarts on a broomstick. Now that was cool.

Shattered Horizon, absolutely. Can we count Tribes? You did have a lot of maneuverability in those suits, to the point that I'd say the majority of the gameplay was airborne.

Flower. Or it's predecessor, Cloud.

Rogue Squadron for N64. Yeah yeah, its space ships, but screw you. That game was amazing.

@fisk0: Tribes! Heck yeah Tribes. Skiing definitely counts as some kind of air combat. Still, I guess flying feels more like a super jump than true blue controlled flight. Well, I dunno. That's memory talking...

@clonedzero: Word. Oh wait. Screw you! Lol. Yeah, it was amazing.

@spacerunaway: Cloud? What the heck is cloud? (looks it up) Huh. Ok. Will put it on the list of things to check out. Flower was pretty interesting but I guess I'm looking for games with combat because it seems having full flight + combat controls ain't easy.

@sunbrozak: The only things I know about those games are from quick looks (HILARIOUS). Is the flying actually fun?

@believer258: Kid Icarus is pretty awesome from what I've seen. Is the whole game on rails though?

Can you fly in Armored Core games? I recall it being flying-ish

There's definitely better stuff out there. I enjoyed the Harry Potter series of films/books quite a lot as I was growing up, so flying a broomstick around Hogwarts appealed to me in that sense. It's not worth looking at otherwise. I also couldn't tell you which games had the "freeroam" flying. It was definitely not the Deathly Hallows games, but I can't exactly remember which previous games allowed for that type of broomstick flight.

@giantstalker: I feel bad now, I've had Shattered Horizon in my Steam inventory for 2 years from the 2011 winter sale and I've never added it to my library. I got it free from crafting some coal pieces....

I think I still have that somewhere.