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Gameplay and Controls
I group these elements together because the gameplay depends on the controls. If a player can’t control a game, how can they play it?

I played the game using the mouse and keyboard, as well as a Saitek X45 flight controller. I found both very intuitive out-of-the-box and didn’t need to change anything to make flying more comfortable.

The yolk and rudder are tied in this game-no independent control of the rudder and ailerons. A soft push left or right makes for a rudder kick, a hard movement will bank and turn. The player has no control of takeoff, nor can he or she land. Instead, when a player’s plane is too damaged to continue, the player is instructed to withdraw from the battle by flying to the edge of the map.

The player does have control of the plane’s speed via a boost. Primary fire fires the machine guns, secondary drops bombs or torpedoes. The hat switch on my joystick allowed me to look around, but I rarely used it.

The campaign part of the game is split into a number (more than 50!) of famous battles, raids, and escorts. One does not have to pass a mission in order to continue. At the end of each mission, the player is given an extra plane if he or she shot down enough enemy aircraft. The player also gets a number of points and increases in rank every so many points.

There are three types of planes in the game: fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers. I preferred the fighter, mostly because it is far more nimble than the others. The bombers are not meant for air-to-air combat, but have what seemed to be stronger machine guns and a tail gunner to fend off pesky interceptors. The fighters have rockets, too. Sweet.

Really, the AI leaves something to be desired. I put it on the hardest difficulty setting and was still dominating. However, there is not a lot of time in these missions before the AI accomplishes their objective, that is, if it’s not to shoot down the player. If its mission is to take out a carrier or bomb ground targets, it will succeed-I think I prevented it on one mission of the 10 or so I played. I was far more successful on the air superiority missions where it was fighter vs. fighter.

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