G4TV

There was a time, not so long ago, when your Personal Computer was a haven for all manner of flight sims. Sure you needed a top of the line rig to run ‘em, and they were all but useless unless you invested in a flightstick or yolk, but if flying virtual aircraft was your bag, that’s just what you’d do.

Today’s PC is a wasteland by comparison. The whiny rivet-counters have scared away all the developers and what’s left is a handful of either super hardcore flight simulators or super silly arcade-style flyers. Battle of Europe claims to be a happy little mix of the two, but don’t be fooled.  This is about as dumbed down as you can get.

Flying for Dummies

Dumbing something down doesn’t automatically make it bad. But in the case of Battle of Europe, it does. This game has “budget title” written all over it.  It’s a bare-bones WWII flight sim with controls that are generally pretty easy to pick up. Nearly everything about the game appears functional and adequate, as long as you’ve never played a flight sim before.

Clearly, the idea here is that flight sims are pretty difficult beasts to love.  Making one more accessible will certainly draw in more players. Quite true. Other games like Blazing Angles and the excellent Crimson Skies play fast and loose with the flight model in order to give novice flyers a leg up. But while Battle of Europe is certainly accessible, it lacks the kind of polish and pizzazz that’s needed to engage the players beyond simple pointing and shooting.

Landing Gears of War

The game offers a scant 10 or so missions. Some of them are branching so if you replay the campaign you might encounter some variation. After a brief training exercise where you learn to take off, land, maneuver, and shoot, you’ll do just what you might expect in a game like thing. Namely, take off, land, maneuver, and shoot.

Flight controls are logically mapped to the keyboard and/or mouse. It doesn’t take long to get used to either as the game has an auto-aim feature that makes it fairly easy to track and take down targets. However, it also eliminates the possibility fine tuning your shots on larger, slow moving targets like bombers. Instead of concentrating on the engines or the cockpit, your bullets all magically hit the fuselage.

The Germans Carry Power-Ups?

Speaking of magic, enemy planes occasionally drop power-ups that can heal your aircraft, or give you super weapons. Perhaps this works in a fantasy flight game like Crimson Skies, but in a WWII flight sim, it just feels completely out of place, no matter how accessible they are trying to make the game. 

Power-ups or no, the game feels oddly unbalanced. Basically, Battle of Europe is pretty easy. Enemy planes usually go down without too much of a fight, and unless you’re ignoring them completely, they aren’t much of a threat. But the mission objectives can be somewhat difficult to achieve. Some missions require you to defend a location from enemy bombers. But by the time you’re able to take off from the airfield, they’re almost to their target. There’s simply no way to shoot them down before they release their payload. Sometimes they miss and sometimes they hit, so your success in the mission has little to do with your piloting skills.

R.A.F.  = Really Average Flyer

Really, there’s not much else to this game. No dynamic campaign, no mission editor, no multiplayer. Aside from a couple of branching missions, there’s little reason to fire this game up after you’ve seen everything. And that won’t take you very long. But the game runs clean and looks nice enough in action. For a budget price, you could do worse.  Yeah, it’s not a ringing endorsement, nor is it meant to be.