Does 'Air Conflicts: Secret Wars' soar proudly on the horizon or does it crash and burn?
'Air Conflicts: Secret Wars' is an arcade-style WWI/WWII flying game developed by bitComposer Games where you play as French female pilot DeeDee Derbec in the search for the father - a WWI pilot himself - she never knew. The story takes on a darker tone soon enough and it had me intrigued throughout the entire game. Although a handful of dramatic sequences aren't always delivered properly, there are some interesting and surprising twists if you let the story grab a hold of you.
- GAMEPLAY, GRAPHICS & AUDIO -
Pick up & play! Thanks to a simple, responsive and smooth control scheme you will be taking down enemy planes and ground targets with relative ease.
A functional HUD with two gauges in the bottom corners display various things such as a mini-map/radar showing friends, foes and other targets. On the top, side and bottom of the left gauge lay the stealth, damage and direction meters. The bottom-right gauge shows your aircraft's power, speed, altitude and a heat monitor for the machine gun.
Lastly there's the Adrenaline-meter which is the equivalent of bullet-time. It is limited but gradually replenishes over time during gameplay. Personally, I didn't use it all that much and the game does not force the player to use it at all, but it's definitely a cool addition and makes for some impressive cinematic kills.
Aircrafts feel great in terms of weight and balance, and they're nicely detailed with bits and pieces flying off during combat. Explosions look and feel excellent. Environments are quite beautiful at first glance but upon closer inspection; buildings, vegetation et cetera are poorly rendered. The buildings in particular have a certain cardboard box-look to them.
Weather effects such as rain, storms, sunrise/set and mist do make up for it by making many maps extremely atmospheric.
The soundtrack is composed of fairly standard bombastic/heroic tunes. They're certainly not bad but you'll eventually grow tired of hearing the same themes over and over.
I've played through the entire game using my trusty Astro A40 Headset & Mixamp 5.8; crisp explosions, machine gun bursts, ambient noise, ... Sound design is ace!
Cutscenes consist of a camera panning over mediocrely drawn stills with voice-overs telling the story. Speaking of which! Voice-acting is a mixed bag: one moment dialogues will sound very natural, but quite cringeworthy the next.
The menus are nice and easy to navigate, loading times are kept to a bare minimum. I believe the game runs at 60fps but have noticed some framedrops, nothing that crippled gameplay though. Sadly there is some frequent and noticable screentearing...
- SINGLE PLAYER CAMPAIGN -
The single player campaign makes a terrible first impression but stick with it and the game will eventually open up beautifully with a wide array of different missions ranging from escort, to stealth, to destroying bridges, to flatout fiery dogfighting. However, some missions can get boring and sometimes tedious but thankfully those are few and far between. Dogfights can get pretty hectic and exciting, especially near the end of a chapter when there's usually a big showdown.
Depending on how well you did within a mission, stars will be awarded. Those are needed to unlock new aircrafts; a total of fourteen planes which you can use in the following missions. All sport different features and handle quite differently as well.
Four difficulties are available from the get-go: Rookie, Pilot, Veteran or Ace. The latter two come recommended for a more challenging experience as the campaign took me somewhere between eight and ten hours to finish on Pilot difficulty.
- MULTIPLAYER & BONUS MODES -
Sadly, online multiplayer is dead so I'm not able to write anything useful about it.
There is however a single player 'Dogfight'-mode where one can choose game type/a whopping 24 maps/weather/timer/total kills/total enemies and so on. You can of course fly with the planes you unlocked in the campaign but only available in this mode is the ability to choose a variety of skins for each plane. This should satisfy those looking for a quick five or ten minute dogfight to kill some time.
- VERDICT -
I really enjoyed this arcade-style flight game. Although I didn't run into any game-breaking issues, do keep in mind that this is a budget game and it lacks quite a bit of polish in a few areas. We've seen better graphics, we've heard better voice-acting and we certainly have experienced better storytelling elsewhere.. But what Air Conflicts does, it does very well.
Don't go in expecting 'IL2 Sturmovik' or 'Birds of Steel' levels of realism but whether you're looking for something in between, be it a fairly lengthy campaign with an enjoyable story or some casual explosive fun in 'Dogfight'-mode, WWI/WWII plane enthusiasts will surely find something to love about this game.
And rest assured, 'Air Conflicts: Secret Wars' does not come with DLC, on-disc ULC, an online pass or any other form of digital extortion so you will not get cheated out of content.
A very decent 7/10