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Kirsten reviews
Activision 
- Price: £39.99
There’s all sorts of war recreation games but most of them are concerned with the foot soldiers’ point of view with games like Medal of Honour and Conflict: Desert Storm, but this handles the aspects of aerial fighting which played a major part of the early wars!
You’re an American pilot in World War II and as usual you’re a hero, so they have to call on you to do everything involved with the war. As the title suggests, this is mainly to do with the war effort between the coast of Dover and Normandy – with visits to other naval sites in france.
At first you have the one plane and as you progress successfully through the missions your arsenal of planes increases as does your weaponry. Starting with basic machine guns you get them upgraded with each different plane having varying machine guns and the ability to hold bombs – oh yes! – you can bomb targets from above!
This game is graphically wonderful – the planes are detailed brilliantly, there is little slowdown even with many many explosions going off around you and multiple enemies. In early levels, you have to fly around the sky shooting down as many planes as you can (obviously enemy planes and not your own). Then you have other missions where you have to concentrate on naval bases and bomb enemy battleships from above. Other levels involve following fleets of tanks who are coming to take over the world and you must bomb them from above too.
Flying is pretty simple but their attempt at realism makes the targetting pretty awkward as obviously it takes some time for machine gun fire to reach from one plane to another so you have to aim suitably far in front of the enemy plane so as not to miss it.
Madness is a good word to describe this game as the enemies just seem to keep appearing thick and fast – a brilliant recreation of a harrowing event and a great change from the land based other games we have on the market.
As the game progresses you get to try out a number of famous planes like the Messerschmitt. One thing I can tell you from this game is that I really don’t want to fly an aircraft made of material while people are shooting at me – but then these guys didnt have a choice! This game does have the ability to make you feel like your really in the war with fantastic sound effects and graphics alike – a must for people who like plane or war games.
Once you finish the game you can apparently get a tie-fighter to fly about in (good old Lucas Arts) but I didn’t get that far yet – keep me posted if you get one!
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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.