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(More customer reviews)Since the dawn of computers with graphics cards, WWI combat games have been a favorite genre with few standouts. "Red Ace Squadron" (RAS), an early entry in the recent revival of this style, achieves what few others do: riveting and enjoyable gameplay without the complexity of either flight simulators or the lengthy and involved "plot" scenarios that are darlings of game magazines and no one else.
The designers of this game realized the task was play, and thus hybridized flying games with flight simulators to produce what might be called a flight combat toy, meaning that it represents reality instead of trying to duplicate it so that users can quickly get into the game and begin enjoying WWI-style aerial combat.
It recreates the fun and strategy of flying without representing the true complexity of an airplane, reaching a new height of playability. Fly with a joystick, or keyboard, or as most do keyboard and mouse, and control will be intuitive. Your missions appear on intro screens in abrupt phrases like "Defend base" and "Destroy tanks," but the translation of this to gameplay requires more tactical precision than one might think.
Maneuvering is the most immediate fun for the user, since once airborne one handles a plane that reacts like a barnstorming psychopath is driving. Pull rolls and take a steep dive - you'll be able to turn away from earth in time. Your plane isn't "fast" in the sense of breathtaking speed of screen display, but events happen quickly enough that the pacing will seem appropriate. In the same way that the designers were realistic about the market for a flying game, they are realistic about missions and make them basic exercises which get complex in their own ways.
The architects of adventure in each of the ten levels in two difficulty modes, through a desire to provide a distinctive type of narrative in each level, give each a basic story: rescue the scientist, protect the plane, bomb things, or mixed combat. Two different worldspaces give different experiences, with most Allied missions set in the fjords of Scandinavia and Axis missions correspondingly served in a desert setting. These missions are designed to allow the user to get immersed quickly into them and begin the process of aerial combat.
Adversaries are not as much smart as they are persistent and accurate, which makes them ideal sparring partners, and the addition of anti-aircraft batteries adds layers to the quick mental plans a pilot makes before a run. There are two characters that are arguably level bosses, in the difficult Axis mission five and the surprisingly easy "secret mission," which is mainly an endurance test. Bombing targets and aiming machine guns is intuitive and addicting.
What is most exciting about the game is how easy it is to maneuver like a professional pilot, but how useless that in itself is because your adversaries are equally empowered. Therefore one quickly learns to take on multiple adversaries and outmaneuver them, catapulting gameplay into the realm of dogfighting, which has been the eternal allure of the simpler days of biplanes and machine guns. Tactical supremacy and an ability to choose targets strategically becomes important here.
The game itself is not perfect; it requires a good video card and a fair amount of processing power, but it is delightful to be able to quickly leap into a game and take on opponents without wading through plot contrivances or setting dials. Some glitches annoy; players get turned back at the outer edges of each level, but enemies can and do take advantage of their ability to do so. Sometimes the game drops to a crawl, which makes the plane unstable; maneuvering is less than exact with mouse or keyboard and sometimes fine corrections cause instability as well. Otherwise, it's very tightly engineered, and it rarely crashes.
My suggestion for these developers, on their next version, is to make the three demo missions into the "easy" level and to focus on making the harder missions incorporate more than one strategy (evade detection, attack group, etc) per mission. It would be nice also to see some American planes so everyone sick of the Americans can shoot them down (this probably includes most Americans, as self-loathing is a national pasttime). Something that might also be fun would be an "instant play" option, where one could get dropped into a randomized setting with no mission other than patrol, dogfight, kill and avoid being killed. That sort of thing is best for us covert game players whose fun begins when the boss gets on the phone.
A tiny studio, Small Rockets, has taken the lead with this game and is now countered by several larger software groups attempting to intrude on this territory. It's all well and good that competition produce the best game possible, but for now, this game dominates in terms of playability and all-around fun. Where other games either feel unstable with mouse control or are complex in unnecessary ways that make tedium part of the play experience, this one is pure action and makes you almost feel like a point-n-click Red Ace.
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