Wings of War review (Xbox)

Wings of War

Wings of War casts you as a rookie pilot who must work his way up the ranks as a frontline pilot during World War I. Through a series of single player missions including search missions as well as dog fights your character, Benjamin “Butch”, grows in experience and the missions become more perilous. The action is conveyed through pre-mission briefings and in flight chatter between the pilots. Throughout the game the range of aircraft increases to you allowing you access to faster craft with better weapons.

Into the action

Wings of War

Wings of War is a single-player only game (on the Xbox, the PC version supports LAN, ed.) but features two modes to keep gamers interested. The campaign mode sees you flying a series of missions that come in two basic flavours being the standard combat missions and reconnaissance missions - the latter involving scouring the landscape for targets. The alternative game mode is Instant Action and pits you in a dogfight with up to 10 computer-controlled opponents either in teams or in all out combat.

The instant action allows you to quickly become accustomed to the controls for battle. The computer-controlled opponents provide a stiff competition and help you to hone your skills. The campaign is where the real action for the single player game lies, though, and this gives a gentler introduction to the controls and combat.

Damaging

Wings of War

The damage model separates the landing gear and the engine from the rest of the plane. This means that swooping too close to the tree tops will make landing difficult and damaging the engine will force you to glide to a landing where your game will be over as you can’t take off again. The battles will tend to damage the planes generally leading to explosions if it takes too much damage (did WW1 planes really explode? My guess is that they’d merely start to burn and then fall into pieces, ed.).

The rest of the damage is fairly uneventful as the planes don’t seem to deteriorate they just explode after a bit of shooting. The targeting also seems a little unreliable. It’s possible to zoom in on an enemy using the binoculars and line your gun sights up perfectly only to miss repeatedly. This makes the combat rather frustrating.

Out of control

Wings of War

The combat could be reprieved with a good control system but sadly the Wings of War controls are slightly lacking. There aren’t any big complaints, the basics are all there, turning and shooting are all easily accessible but the fancy moves are slightly more awkward. Pressing the white button and turning performs barrel rolls, break turns and loops but it’s a rather tricky combination to find when you’re concentrating on shooting and accelerating. It may not sound that difficult but it’s not as intuitive as it could be making avoiding bullets slightly more difficult than it need be.

I Can See For Miles

Wings of War

The graphics in Wings of War are not bad but also not great. Most of the action takes high above the ground so the detail doesn’t need to be great in the ground scenery. Some of the missions have you attacking ground targets such as vehicles and base stations and as you get close to the ground it looks rather flat and featureless. This makes it difficult to judge the distances as the ground rushes up when you dive.

On the other hand Wings of War uses surround sound to good effect in combat. The positional audio helps to locate the enemy planes as they attack you from all sides. The sounds effects are quite good with gunfire sounding realistic as well as the explosions of enemy and friendly craft. The action in the missions is progressed by average voice acting, though. This is carried on through the mission briefings, which are rather long and tedious giving you every mission objective in advance rather than starting with a small objective and revealing the others as the mission progresses. Since the briefing is scrolling text over a map it means that most of the time you’ll want to skip it.

Underwhelming

Wings of War is a playable game and even enjoyable most of the time. The most frustrating thing I found with it was an autosave that occurred just as I destroyed the engine on my plane right at the end of the first mission. That meant every time I restarted I had a gentle glide to the ground and had to restart the mission. Aside from that the only problems I’ve found are minor but put together make the game less enjoyable.

If you’re into aerial combat titles then this might entertain you but there is little specific to recommend it. Each aspect of gameplay is flawed in some way but not too significantly. I suspect that if a sequel is made the developers will be able to tidy up these imperfections and will be able to create a first class title but until then, this one just doesn’t cut it.