Platform:
Xbox Genre: Shooter / Action Publisher: Gathering Developer: Silver Wish Games ESRB: T (Teen) Released: Q4 2004
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Wings of War
Score: 7.0 / 10
Pros: -
Excellent flying controls
- Revisits a war that hasn’t seen much play in the gaming market in a
while
- Arcade-style gameplay and forgiving physics keeps plenty of action
coming your way with a minimal level of frustration
Cons: -
No online play for Xbox version even though PC version does
- Dull and low-end graphics
- May be too arcade-oriented for gamers that may be interested in a WWI
warplane flight simulation instead
- Cut-scenes don’t make any sense or serve any real purpose
- Missions get repetitive
"...despite
some inane gameplay features, the arcade-style flying and fighting is
very good."
World
War II-based games have been unbelievably popular the last few years,
and the upcoming game release calendar is highlighted by a plethora of
titles focusing on Vietnam, so it’s strange indeed to see a title
using WWI as its war of choice. Even stranger is that the game I’m
referring to, Wings of War (WoW), is a budget-priced ($20US)
plane-fighting title. Whereas WWI happened in the infancy of the
airplane when biplanes were the machines of flying combat, WWII was the
first war where the evolving plane technology created a full-scale
theater of war in the skies above Europe and the Pacific.
That’s why there have been plenty of WWII games that take advantage of
WWII aircraft battles. WWI flight warfare has had its share of titles in
the early days of gaming, especially on the PC, but the developers of WoW
took a bit of a risk trying to reach a mass audience today with a WWI
title that strictly adheres to WWI aircraft melees (featuring
slower-moving aircraft compared to their WWII counterparts). But WoW is
largely a good effort, and the cheap price, stellar plane controls, and
using a seemingly-forgotten-by-the-gaming-realm war as its backdrop make
WoW at the very least interesting if not downright enjoyable at times.
Just don’t expect WoW to come close to either Crimson Skies or Secret
Weapons Over Normandy, two similar but much better titles.
WoW places you in the cockpit as a WWI fighter pilot. You go through 70
missions over the course of 13 levels. There is a story, if it could be
called that, leading you from level to level. But there’s never a
serious attempt to engross the gamer in an involved storyline. The
cut-scenes that play during ending sequences of the mission, which you
would assume were designed to tie together a story, seemingly were edited
by 12-year-olds, because there’s no rhyme or reason to them and no story
ever unfolds while watching.
Instead, the focus of the game is hot-and-heavy dogfighting using WWI
aircraft. Now, WWI aircraft certainly weren’t the most sophisticated
flying crafts ever designed. After all, aviation was in its formative
years.
But anybody enamored with soaring in authentic WWI planes in a
simulation-style game should be warned: WoW is definitely not a simulation
game, sharing more in common with Crimson Skies than a truer simulation
game such as Secret Weapons Over Normandy. This is arcade flying fighting
at its finest, complete with bonus power-ups and an unrealistically
never-ending supply of on-board machine-gun ammo. (It’s also an
impossibility that these planes could have carried the overwhelming
arsenal of both rockets and bombs that are supplied.)
Fortunately, like Crimson Skies, the arcade-style action is very
entertaining, although the mission requirements are repetitive on each
level. Each level requires basically the same goals: you must shoot down
enemy planes; destroy tanks, other personnel-carrying vehicles, boats, and
trains; take reconnaissance photos; and a few other minor but repeating
tasks, some which are timed. A very few mission objectives require you to
land and occupy ground-based fixed gun positions to shoot enemy planes out
of the sky you just had been airborne in. The photo-taking missions are
particularly (and unintentionally) funny. You have to jump from your
plane, do a back-flip, land in another plane that has a camera, and take
photos of key enemy installments. Then, after taking the required photos,
you jump in same back-flip fashion back into your plane, which somehow has
managed to stay in perfect flying synchronization with the
photoreconnaissance plane. Yeah, like that could happen.
But again, I’ll go back to WoW’s saving grace: despite some inane
gameplay features, the arcade-style flying and fighting is very good.
You’ll face wave after wave of German enemy planes (and zeppelins) in
various points throughout the mission. And you need to have top-flight
shooting skills to zap the constantly moving targets that are your enemy.
WoW’s controls really impressed me. Due to a well-designed control
schematic, there was never any disorienting physics that occur in
simulation-style games where authentic flying controls become frustrating
because it’s easy to get upside down or topsy-turvy and crash into terra
firma. You’ll be doing a lot of climbing and diving while chasing and
escaping planes, and having intuitive controls that always keep you even
keel helps eliminate battling not only the enemy but the game’s
controls.
In tandem with the great controls is the easy-access mapping system, which
allows you with a press of the right thumbstick to pull up the mission map
and immediately see each plane’s placement in the vicinity as well as
other enemy targets and mission objective points.
The biggest letdown of WoW is that there is no Xbox Live gameplay. This is
in light of the fact that the PC version of WoW has online-enabled
features. Xbox Live support could have made this a perfect bargain bin
pickup if for nothing else but the opportunity to dogfight the online
skies.
Another
weak area is the dull and low-end visuals. This is a very
less-than-ordinary looking title graphically and clearly doesn’t use any
of the graphical potential of the Xbox at all. However, the sound elements
fare much better. The differentiating sounds when the plane is flying
steady compared to diving rapidly are noticeable and the pseudo-orchestral
soundtrack and music fit perfectly with the early 20th Century setting of
WoW.
WoW doesn’t compare to the quality of either Crimson Skies and Secret
Weapons over Normandy. Still, gamers who are captivated with flying
shooters and need a respite from the other two more prominent Xbox
offerings will want to give WoW a test flight, especially considering its
bargain price. There are enough intense plane battles to keep you playing
through the entire mission docket. And with all the WWII and Vietnam War
games on the market, all of us gamers could stand a little reintroduction
to the history of WWI.
