Somewhere down there is Pavlov's House, my favourite COD level.Ī generous selection of single missions and a skirmish generator even clumsier than IL-2's don't compensate for the lazy campaign. What we've ended up with not only discourages replay, it may, thanks to some dodgy triggers and jagged difficulty spikes, mean many players never reach Berlin. All that was required from the engine was a sense of continuity and a hint of uncertainty. There was no need for anything as fancy as Battle of Britain II or Falcon 4.0's extraordinary unscripted wars. Get a good haul of Panzers one day and the fascist advance falters! Fail to provide air support for the beleaguered Guards and the Red Army lose ground! The six stunning theatres are large enough for moving frontlines. gripping action is guaranteed, but the missions are so nakedly scripted, so obviously condensed, natural thrills like the adrenalin jolt of a scramble or the slow-ramped tension of a long-distance raid, never get a look in.ĭusting off one of the sim community's favourite refrains, what Wings of Prey really needed - what it deserved - was some sort of dynamic campaign or random sortie generator. Go here, bomb that, shoot some of those down. If you want an Axis campaign, get the add-on. Cut-scenes and diary entries - confusingly, all voiced by the same weary American actor - narrate without panache or insight, never explaining why we are RAF recruit Barnaby Tuck one minute, and VVS stalwart Sergey Basov the next. Wings of Prey's 21-link sortie chain stretches across Kent, Stalingrad, Sicily, the Korsun Pocket, the Ardennes and Berlin, with nary a mission choice or bonus scenario in sight. Linear mission sequences might cut it in a genre like FPS, but in a plot-less flight title, they're a recipe for frustration and shortevity (and if that's not in the dictionary, it bally-well should be). Yes, this is the latest in a long line of high-fidelity airware to ship with a teaspoon-shallow campaign system. What the developers haven't managed to do is make those dogfights feel meaningful. With the help of IL-2 Sturmovik's flight and aircraft models, Gaijin has reproduced the look, sound and feel of 1939-45 era dogfights astonishingly well. The game's tragedy is that it's only the best WWII flight sim ever made some of the time. Ask me what I think of Wings of Prey at this precise moment, and I'll tell you it's the best WWII flight sim ever made. I'm upside down, hurtling along at 300mph, and there's a big juicy Messerschmitt sliding helplessly into the crucible of my gun sight. Smoke-wreathed Sicilian vineyards are my sky, Prussian-blue firmament studded with black flak flowers is my ground.
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