Reviewed: April 5, 2008
Reviewed by: Chris Wong

Publisher
Destineer

Developer
Big John Games

Released: February 25, 2008
Genre: Flight Action
Players: 1

5
5
7
5
5.5

Supported Features:

There are no DS features in this game. No touch screen. No microphone. No Wi-Fi, although, there is multi-card play. This is somewhat of a disappointment because most flight simulators of this sort try to be as realistic as possible, especially for when flying a plane. The use of a touch screen would make sense for this game to make the player feel like a pilot; like adjusting speed. Instead everything is used with the control pad and the A and B buttons.

The entirety of the game will become repetitive after each and every mission. Your main objective would be to shoot down enemy planes. So, you’ll be doing a lot of dog fighting. Naturally, you’d expect that means it would require you to have great maneuvering skills. At least, that’s what I thought. The only maneuvering you can do is make a big circle left or right, which your German enemy will be able to easily follow you making it incredibly difficult to get behind him. You can, however, slow down while turning to make a sharp turn, but then you’d just go head on into your enemy and crash.

One nice feature, though, is that you are able to stall if you fly too high without enough speed. That is about the only realistic thing about piloting a plane in this game. Oh, you’re also completely alone. No wingman or anything; just you, a lone pilot trying to take back Europe. Each mission begins with a cutscene of you flying with your fleet, and then you drift off away to your mission. You may have to take out 3 or 4 fighters, but they all come after you at once.

In variance to taking out enemy planes, you have to take out enemy planes before they return back to Germany or before they destroy one of your British air fields. However, you aren’t given a time limit of when they will return to their homeland or how much health the air field has. All of a sudden a mission can end in failure if an enemy plane drops a bomb then leaves. However, since realism doesn’t have health bars and time limits, much of that can be looked over, but pilots have extra wingmen. A lone pilot is easy prey in German air space.

At first glance, the graphics seem impressive. It has a nice opening CG rendered video and the planes come out to be in great detail. However, once you start a mission, you realize you can hardly tell where you are. You can tell the sky and ground apart but you can’t tell how far apart they are, or rather, how far you are from the ground. Some missions require you to be low to the ground, but you just can’t tell how close you are and there is no warning. This is easily fixed with lighting and shading, but this is completely omitted. In fact, an entire shadow is completely omitted.

To be realistic, there is no music while flying a mission. You’ll be hearing your propellers the entire mission and the sounds of your gun firing. This might become enjoyable as you want to feel like you are flying a plane in 1940.

There are only a few missions that can be rather short and repetitive; you can probably bring in about an hour. You won’t be playing this game more than once since you may be replaying missions in order to complete it the first time. However, because of its repetitiveness, you may not even finish the game at all one time.

Unless you like flight simulators, you may want to avoid this game. And even if you do, you may not want to pay the full price tag. You can probably find a better flight simulator out there and it’ll be more realistic. But if you do like simple flight simulators, then this one wouldn’t be a bad choice.