Wings of Prey is a classic WWII flight simulator that puts the player in the midst of some of the most historic air battles of the century. Berlin, Dover, The Bulge; All of these battles are faithfully represented in all of their splendour and terror. The game is quite the heroing first effort from it’s developer YuPlay, but isn’t without flaws, and lots of ‘em.
This game is first and foremost about the single player campaign. Each new battle is presented to the player with a small film explaining the backstory behind their next actions, which helps a lot in the immersion department. Prior to launch, you’re given a few options with regards to how realistic you want the flight dynamics to be. Whether or not you choose to take off from the airport, play on arcade mode, simulator, etc; It has no bearing on your overall mission, but merely serves as added immersion if you so choose to. You have a set of about four or five rotating goals: Bomb this, shoot this down, unexpected squardon oh noes!, etc. But then again, there’s not much originality one can use when trying to be true-to-history. This is one of the major points of failure of this game. The WWII shooter is so played-out on land, air, and otherwise that it’s time that we stopped beating the dead horse that is the genre. For every one of these games that we see, there are 100 others out there that have done it better. I’d personally like to see more alt-history or original stories in upcoming titles rather than a re-hash of the same damned war. Hell, I think even a WWI shooter would be a welcome change.
The ever-important immersion-factor is SO close to being good, but it just isn’t a lasting experience. The game is absolutely gorgeous, especially for being a DX9.0 title. Sounds are extremely well-done, and damage modeling is top-notch. However, the novelty wears off quickly and I found myself bored after a while. It’s not enough to keep attention.
Flight dynamics and physics themselves are quite good. Putting the difficulty on simulator is almost unbearably difficult, even for my seasoned MS Flight Sim skills. Yanking the aircraft into a full-on barrel roll too fast will result in a catastrophic tail spin ending in an all-too-intimate acquaintance with Nazi-Germany’s fine soil. I feel that the planes themselves were capable of more than the developers designed them for, but then again, I’ve never crashed a P-51 into oblivion so I wouldn’t know. Arcade mode, however, is perfect for the beginners. You’ll not find yourself getting frustrated if you haven’t spent 1,000,000 hours on flight sims before. Controls in this mode are simple, and very forgiving.
Multiplayer… God… Multiplayer… Ugh… It’s just awful. Just. Plain. Awful. The first problem is that: nobody owns the game, at least legally. So, there are only about 20-30 players on at any given time. Period. The second is the lengthy, buggy registration process that one must go through to use online features. You must buy the game through Steam, register your key through Steam, then register at YuPlay’s website, verify your key through their website, login to Steam, login to YuPlay, and then you MIGHT be able to authenticate without some bogus key verification error. The third problem is the lack of dedicated servers and host migration issues. Lag abounds in unfathomable quantities. This is inexcusable. With these types of games, smooth interaction between players is CRUCIAL. I have yet to play a single round where planes were jutting about the sky in intervals by as much as 500-1000 ft! It’s just simply NOT playable. YuPlay really needs to fix their server situation before putting out another multiplayer game like this. Seriously, it’s the worst multiplayer I’ve ever experienced, even since the good ‘ol days.
Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this title to most. There are just too many things to discount here that makes the game fail as a whole. If you like flight sims, you might be able to stand picking this one up. But even then, definitely not worth my money.
