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Fun arcade-style air combat

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: September 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I had played their first game of this type, "Air Conflicts", which covers the European and Eastern Fronts in World War II, flying British, German and Soviet aircraft, which I found surprisingly enjoyable and fun, despite the simple arcade-style game play.

This style of game is not everyone's cup of tea, of course. It's not a true flight simulator. You can use a joystick or mouse to control the aircraft, although I found the mouse easier to use. If you've never used a mouse to fly a plane before, it may take a while to get the hang of it, but after a few missions you should be flying without any trouble.

For a relatively simple game, the enemy AI is actually pretty good, while your fellow pilots are not especially helpful much of the time. Quite often you'll find yourself alone, all of your fellow pilots having been shot down. Ideally, you should help protect them, but some missions the goals are such that you simply do not have time to save them and still be able to complete the mission.

I have finished the American side of the game and while some missions were more difficult than others, one mission I never was able to successfully complete. This mission involved attacking a Japanese fleet with a torpedo bomber, the mission goal being to sink the five Japanese battleships before the Japanese aircraft and battleships sink the American fleet. I flew this mission at least two dozen times and never was able to successfully complete it. I received little help from sinking the battleships from my fellow torpedo bomber pilots, and by the time I sank all five battleships, the American fleet was usually sunk or sinking. A few times I managed to sink the battleships, and there was at least one American ship still afloat (although still under attack by Japanese aircraft). However, the mission would end up a failure because that last ship would then be sunk. Although no further mission goal info was ever provided, I assume the goal was to then protect the remainder of the American fleet by shooting down the attacking Japanese aircraft, but I never was able to get back there before the last American ship was sunk. Eventually I gave up on that mission, which the game does at least allow you to move on if you get stuck on a particular mission. The rest of the missions I was able to complete successfully, although some were more difficult than others and required several tries before completing them.

I am currently playing the game from the Japanese side and while some of the missions are the exact opposite of the American missions, some are entirely new. Some gamers could probably blow through this game, playing both sides, in a matter of a few hours, but an average player might take as much as ten hours to play through both sides.

The aerial battles are great fun, while the ship attack missions can be brutal and the ground attack missions can get to the point of being unbearably tiresome as the targets, usually tanks and gun sites, are difficult to spot even with the target markers, which disappear as you get close to the target. One mission where you have to take out a numbe rof enemy tanks in Manila, I ended up destroying half the city trying to take out these vehicles. You are not penalized for collateral damage, although careful maneuvering, to line your aircraft up with the street so you hit only the vehicle, is possible but even then it might take more than one pass to take out a single vehicle.

If you are looking for accurate flight simulation, or even missions based on historical fact, you will be disappointed with this game. The planes' physical appearance are actually quite well done for such a game. For some fun game play, this is a nice little game.

Disappointed

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 8
Date: August 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Could only get the game to load in "window" mode (not full screen mode), and even then the graphics engine produced gameplay that was choppy and just wasn't quite right. I know that this is a game developed/optimized for an NVIDIA graphics chipset (so it says on the retail box) and I have an ATI card; but despite that my system specs are double what the game states is required, the program still seemed to hang and caused my system to become unresponsive until I killed the application w/ the task manager.

It's also worthy to note that I checked the developer's website to see if there were patches or other updates before giving up on this game. I found nothing.

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