Combat Wings: Battle of Britain
Preview
Won't fail to rock the wannabe fighter pilots when it arrives
by Marko Susimetsä
previewed on PC
The war has begun
The World War II has begun and Britain has to defend its skies from the Luftwaffe fighters and bombers. Many inexperienced men are drafted into the RAF and, after only a brief training, they are flying Hawker Hurricanes or Spitfires to face German free-roving fighter sweeps or bomber formations.
Combat Wings: Battle of Britain is City Interactive's sequel to their 2005 title Combat Wings, that focused on the Pacific War. This time, the attention is, as the title says, on the Battle of Britain. The player will fly Hawker Hurricanes and Supermarine Spitfires, among other planes of the period. Like the original, CW: BoB is not attempting to be a flight simulator - rather, it is an easy-to-learn action game.
Knights of the sky
The most beautiful fighter plane ever built is undoubtedly the Spitfire - the RAF fighter type that remained in service from the early WWII until the 1950s and appeared in dozens of different variants as the technology developed and situations required. In CW: BoB, Spitfire has just started to roll out from the production lines and is thus armed with machine guns and, when needed, bombs. It was only in 1941 with the introduction of Spitfire Mark IVs, that 20mm cannons officially replaced some of the machine gun emplacements on Spitfires making them much more formidable dogfighters, but, unfortunately, CW: BoB does not follow the development of the planes in this detail. Furthermore, CW: BoB provides the planes with weapons that they did not carry historically: so-called RP-3 rockets. These anti-aircraft rockets were actually only fitted on some RAF bombers and were only useful against slow targets.
In addition to the Spitfire and Hurricane, CW: BoB presents many other RAF fighter planes of the era, such as the Hawker Tornado (that never entered production) and the Westland Whirlwind (the first dual-engine fighter). In addition, there are bombers, such as the Halifax and, of course, enemy planes such as Stukas and good old Messerschmitts.
Gameplay
When the game starts, you get to choose the difficulty settings from easy to hard, which effects the skills of the enemies, the difficulty of aiming, as well as the airplane's "shields". You can also choose the control method between arcade and advanced. Basically, the arcade mode allows you to move the mouse to control the crosshairs of your weapons and your plane follows as well as it can. This makes for a very easy gameplay for those casual gamers who are only armed with a mouse. The advanced mode forces you to control the plane itself and you have to follow your enemies through their evasive manoeuvres in the hard, and more satisfactory way. This is darn difficult to do with a mouse, so you will probably need a real joystick controller. However, a neat little setting, "show mouse cursor" helps a little bit with this.
In the game, you can either fly the plane in a chase view, or more traditionally, in a cockpit view. You can also get alternative outside views if you just want to admire your plane in-flight. All in all, even using the advanced controls mode, the planes seem to be very simple to fly and you will have to work hard to make them stall. In essence, CW: BoB, is an arcade game and you will make a mistake if you expect it to offer the same challenge as a full-fledged simulator would.
