ARCADE FLYING
User Rating: 5.5 | Heroes Over Europe X360
Heroes Over Europe is an arcade flying video game developed by Transmission Games and published by Ubisoft. It is the sequel to Heroes of the Pacific. Heroes Over Europe follows three pilots - an American, a British, and a New Zealander - through fourteen missions during World War II. The game features over 40 World War II planes and online support for 16 players in Dogfight, Team Dogfight, Survivor, and Team Survivor game modes. Heroes Over Europe is a World War II air combat game that lies firmly in the arcade category. While this means you can jump into a Spitfire and shoot down Nazi planes without having to worry about losing ammunition or stalling your plane, it also results in a game that just isn't rewarding to play. The repetitive missions, terrible voice acting, and shallow difficulty curve all conspire against Heroes Over Europe, which stalls before it even leaves the runway. The campaign follows a rough chronological structure, as certain missions with the earlier squadrons are only playable once they've been unlocked later on in the game. Each squadron has its own set of airplanes to fly with, and you can unlock more as you progress, especially if you play at the higher difficulty and perform secondary objectives. That said, the single-player game is quite short with only 14 missions, and the overall easy difficulty and frequent checkpoints mean you don't have to retry too many challenges. The greater problem is that the game is just too repetitive. Each mission may take place in a different location, but the challenges all revolve around dogfighting and bombing, which are often repeated many times over in each mission. There are some imaginative objectives, such as staving off a group of bombers while fire engines try to extinguish a blaze--but shooting planes out of the sky and bombing static targets certainly becomes repetitive in this game.
