This game tells a small part of the saga of the Second World War, seen through the eyes of four fighter pilots, each with his little back story. Two of them belong to the Royal Navy of Great Britain (RAF), one is enrolled in the Royal New Zealand Force (RNZAF) and one is from overseas representing the United States on the European front (USAAF). Of course, the story which is told here is more personal, somewhat tragic, not found in the history books.
Before each mission, animated movies present the life in time of war in the eyes of each of the protagonists, trying to follow a chronological order – even if that translates into a total of four campaigns, from which the players do not understand anything. There are also the always present war movies and their quality is beyond reproach in terms of content: fighting, explosions, shift speeds next to enemy aircrafts.
Of course, everything I described above leaves the feeling that there is a story, but the story does not really exist. The linearity is at its home and the fact that you cannot pass a mission and automatically you block the rest of the campaigns is extremely annoying, and this happens even from the second mission (about this, later). So, we have to close this chapter and move on to another one, which is: the graphics.
As was expected, the focus was on the planes, which are represented in their smallest detail, a few times I even looked at some models which I found on the Internet, to convince myself that they have the same mean and same colors. From this point of view, I have nothing to reproach.
The problem arises however when flying next to the ground: even though most buildings are painstakingly worked here (the mission in Lodon resembles a lot with the one from Blazing Angels, a regular user could swore that they gave copy-paste to the whole town), as the roads too and some decorative elements, the trees or other items rarely encountered, such as radar stations or ports, it is noticed that they are totally wrong in size, all being too small if you compare them to the size of an airplane. Even the bombers, but here there is room for interpretation.
Heaven, the next thing that we literally touch nose to nose, left me with breathless, because of the volumetric clouds, which even managed to create the impression that I am going through “something”. The distance from ground to cloud ceiling is not very plausible, but this is a second part. The weather conditions or the rain to keep it short, is quite successful, but unfortunately they did not add the effect of “leakage” of water on screen, as it can be seen in HAWX, for example.
Another thing related to graphics is the HUD’s absence. Since the game is the successor of Heroes of the Pacific it was obvious that the view from cockpit to not be implemented, but once it gained new shades of realism, it should have been introduced at least some helpful tools. In other words, the only signs are the life one, the one for the secondary weapon (torpedo / missile / bomb) and altimeter. That’s as if I were stupid enough, that I can count the branches of trees, but I cannot realize that I am flying too low.
This thing seems inadmissible, and I will give you an examples of a shirk which requires 450 meters of altitude. How could I know that I’m at 430 m and I will reach the ground in no time? Simply, I get my head out the glass and keep my eyes open. The player will surely miss the guidance systems from IL-2 Sturmovik (Forgotten Battles, and why not HAWX, no matter how SF is this).
Let’s continue with the control system. The game provides two control modes, Arcade and Professional. In the Arcade mode, once the stick is turned to left or right, the plane will start a turn and will go in the same direction. In order to maintain the altitude, while you are making a turn, you need to stop the tear, then resume. The Pro mode brings us closer to reality: the tilt of the stick to the right brings the plane in a position ready for turning (basically, a twist of 90 degrees) then you will need to move the flaps up or down with the left stick. Actually, this is the only thing that differentiates the two game modes.
The next thing that is related to control is Ace Kill. An element of gameplay quite interesting at first, which becomes very boring having repetitive tasks and that is likely to not be perfect for lovers of simulators. It works pretty simple, once you fly behind an aircraft, or move directly toward it, a meter will appear and once filled, you can get in the Ace Kill mode.
Here you get a slow-motion image and zoom. The target is between certain points of the airplane, tank or machine gun. Choose the target, draw and shoot down the enemy, which falls without comments. Of course, this is not always a successful maneuver, and in many cases, the target does not even reach a position from where it is good to shoot, but it is appreciated the desire of creating a flying sniper.
At the Control chapter, there is also something to say about the aircraft behavior during flight, regardless of country of manufacture. The aircraft sometimes does not want to enter into tail spin and many times it makes maneuvers often lacked both of physics and of common sense. You can make maneuvers with a plane that in reality would make the wings to break the fuselage. If we have to speak about AI in this game, we must say that we can put together the AI of the enemies, of the teammates and of the allied bombers and obtain a nice and big AI, which causes headaches, because if you do not take them all together, separately they won’t provide anything spectacular.
