1 Feb

Wings of Prey

Filed under: PC Games No Responses

The graphics are gorgeous and the detail of the landscape you fly over is insane.

Once upon a time, flight simulators were practically synonymous with PC games. Some of my earliest gaming memories involved messing around in such games as Night Hawk: F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0 and B-17 Flying Fortress. I was never much good with them, but they seemed like such a staple of PC gaming that you couldn’t avoid them. These days it seems that things have come full circle and flight simulators are barely alive as a genre at all. I can’t even remember the last time I played one before this.

Even so, Wings of Prey is not a true flight simulator, being a PC port of the console game Birds of Prey. The game has three realism modes, Arcade, Realistic and Simulator, but even at its highest setting, it’s not anything that calls for a thick ring-bound manual to play. The surest sign of how hardcore a flying game is can be seen from its manual and the PDF for the Steam version of the game that I bought looks suspiciously thin. Even the included tutorials and guides are pretty simple.

In my case of course, that’s just fine as I’m a long way from being a student with enough time on my hands to play any game that still needs you to manually run pre-flight checks and turn on your engine. While I experimented with Realistic mode for a number of missions, I mostly stayed in Arcade mode and was happy with it for the most part. It felt odd that the propeller-driven planes hardly ever stalled, even while doing steep climbs, but I didn’t care enough to develop the skills needed to beat the game without resorting to these aids.

Real fans will say that in-cockpit view is the only way to play the game, but I’m too much of a noob to deal with the lack of visibility.

Wings of Prey covers the European theatre of World War 2 and without the Wings of the Luftwaffe DLC, you can only fly Allied planes. The single-player campaign has you flying such planes as British Hurricanes and Spitfires in the Battle of Britain and the Allied invasion of Sicily, American Mustangs in the Battle of the Bulge and Soviet Yaks and Sturmoviks in the Battle of Stalingrad and the final fall of Berlin. It’s a pity that you get to see the German Me 262, the first jet fighter, in the Battle of Berlin but you don’t get to fly one unless you buy the DLC.

The game’s graphics are undeniably gorgeous. All of the planes are of course, finely detailed, inside and out. Combat damage shows up on the model too. As you get hit, you’ll see cockpits blackened with soot, ragged holes in wings, the works. But what impressed me most of all is the richness of the landscapes you fly over. Early in the campaign, you’re assigned as a wingman to a flight leader who leads a patrol over Dover. Naturally, your route sends you around picturesque Dover Castle on the coast. It’s an exhilarating opening to the game.

Also impressive is the scale of the battlefield. This isn’t Falcon 4.0, so the game isn’t modelling the entire theatre in real-time. It’s essentially just a big map but boy, is this map crowded with stuff. In addition, to all of the landscape details, houses, streets, fields etc. I mentioned, there are also planes, ships, tanks, AA emplacements etc. In the Battle of Britain scenarios, it feels like there are hundreds of planes in the sky and you can’t fly anywhere without crossing a contrail or wandering in someone’s field of fire. In the final assault on Berlin, the whole city is a hive of activity with friendly planes doing bombing runs of their own and buildings exploding everywhere.

You can fly big bombers too and even operate the machinegun turret if you want.

The game includes both dogfighting and bombing missions, sometimes at the same time! Yeah, I was pretty incredulous when I had to fight off enemy fighter while flying a bomber. In Arcade mode, the mission is perfectly happy to pit you against dozens of enemies, which is I suppose the designers’ way of balancing the difficulty for the more relaxed flight model. Higher realism settings reduce the number of targets, so that for some missions, this actually makes them easier to complete. The missions are the usual fare. Some dogfighting missions simply require you to fly from one waypoint to the next, destroying all designated enemy fighters along the way. Others require you to take down a flight of enemy bombers before they reach their target or defend your bombers long enough for them to hit their targets.

Bombing runs have you targeting everything from enemy destroyers to airfields to tanks and fuel trucks. One curious oddity is that the game allows you to take over the turret while flying bombers so you can personally swat down annoying enemy fighters, but you’re also expected to still fly the bomber itself at the same time. It’s tricky but thankfully you’re not asked to do this very often. It’s all rather standard stuff, good if you like flying planes but nothing exceptional or surprising. One notable exception is when you’re told to fly a plane at very low altitudes below the treeline to sneak up on an enemy base.

Once you’re done with the admittedly quite short campaign, the game also includes a large number of one-off missions. I didn’t spend a lot of time with them however as many seem quite perfunctory. One mission type is simply patrolling from one waypoint to another, with absolutely no combat involved. Good for people who want to do serious flying in Simulator mode maybe, but too boring for me. Some other missions are much harder, such as taking down enemy bombers within a certain time limit. The good thing about this part is that just attempting one mission will unlock the next one, so you don’t have to kill yourself beating a mission and can choose to just skip it.

That’s a lot of planes and bullets in the sky! Don’t get hit.

The worst thing about the game is that while its production values are otherwise fantastic, its Russian developers chose to skimp on the writing and voice-acting. They have just one guy doing the narration for everything, which sounds ridiculous when he’s supposed to be portraying a Brit one moment and a Russian the next. The writing is full of the worst tropes from war films, full of angst, war-weariness and homesickness. Delivered in that terrible monotone, it was one of the very few times in all my PC gaming that I felt like skipping it to go straight to the mission. I understand that the point is to add a human element to the game but it would have been so much better if they had just stuck to the historical background behind each mission.

Anyway, I’m not a flight simulator fan and this game didn’t make me a convert. But I bought it expecting some not too heavyweight World War 2 flying action and Wings of Prey certainly delivered on that front. It felt good to play another flying game after so long and the game is certainly easy on the eyes with the just the right amount of difficulty at Arcade level. I guess hardcore flight simulator fans won’t be too happy with it but I suspect that this is the only sort of flying game that will sell in significant numbers now.

Written on February 1 2011 and is filed under PC Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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