Warbird Information Exchange

I've never owned a video game console, not even an Atari or Pong set, but my sons have reached the age where it's a social must-have, so there's an Xbox 360 in the den now. They enjoy their licensed Lego adventure games, but soon it was time for me to go looking for some aerial entertainment after their bedtime rolls around.

I've been playing computer flight sims since MS Flight Simulator came out for the Commodore 64, and misspent many hours with Aces Over Europe/Pacific, European Air War, the MS Combat Flight Sims, and IL-2 Sturmovik. I tend to dial the realism settings up to "11" and enjoy sightseeing, trying on different planes, practicing circuits-and-bumps and aerobatics as much as combat, so I stayed away from the arcade style "sims" that are out there. Could there possibly be a console flight sim I would enjoy?

Some of you gamers already know the answer. "Birds of Steel", released about 6 months ago, is a sequel to the Xbox port of IL-2 Sturmovik. Unquestionably both Il-2 and Birds of Steel are watered down compared with Il-2 for the PC, which is now a monstrosity offering over 300 types of flyable planes in every WWII theater, with ridiculous amounts of detail in every aspect. The Xbox Il-2 port plucked the most popular scenarios and aircraft from the PC game, focusing on Europe and the Eastern front, and kept as much of the flight-model realism as they thought the Xbox and its audience could handle. Inevitably an accurate WWII flight sim is doomed to be a niche title, but Il-2 did well enough in the niche to provoke a sequel. Birds of Steel is focused on the Pacific theater, although it retains virtually the entire aircraft roster from Il-2 with (barely) enough missions to try them all out.

For an old PC simmer, playing a flight sim on a console has pros and cons. Nothing touches a good PC for performance and realism. However, I long ago stopped upgrading my PC just for the purpose of gaming, as a result of which I can barely run Sturmovik. There are always glitches, bugs and crashes with PCs because of the variety of setups available. With a console, the game developer has a fixed platform and OS to make the game run under, and the Xbox 360 is a strong enough system for some nice graphic effects. The main thing that I miss in playing a console sim is the variety of skins, missions and other add-ons that the third-party developers and the player community create for PC sims. Then again, I collected a lot more add-ons for my PC sims than I ever found time to fly.

Birds of Steel boasts that you can fly more than 100 types of aircraft - fighters, bombers of every size from Dauntless to Lancaster, and recon types. This is a little inflated by the counting of sub-types, and once you account for there being two to seven variants of many types available, there are maybe 40 or 50 distinct types available in the game. Still, many obscure types like Fiat C.R. 42, Beaufort, Buffalo, Wirraway etc. are included. Of the really famous and important fighter types, there is very satisfactory coverage, with the P-47 being the most glaring American omission (available as an extra-cost download, along with an OS2U), the Typhoon and any Griffon Spitfire missing from the UK roster, and many Italian and Japanese types absent. In fact, given that the game's campaigns center around the Pacific war, the biggest coverage issue is that they dwindle out around late 1943 and there are no B-29s, any late-war Japanese fighters other than the Ki-61 to attack them with, nor late American types such as an SB2C, P-38J/L, P-61 or FM-2. It occurred to me to wonder if the fact that the game's developer is Japanese has to do with the exclusion of the final stages of the Pacific war, but all the Japanese WWII buffs I know are proud of their country's efforts to beat back the Americans with J2Ms, N1Ks, Ki-44s, Ki-84s and so on, and these would be fun missions to fly.

The game starts with a training course in basic flying, takeoffs and landings, dive-bomb and torpedo attacks. Paint scheme police will finding something to gripe about in the very first training mission, as the US cocarde is painted on the wrong wings of the Wildcat. Overall, though, everything about the appearance of the aircraft, including the virtual cockpits, is good looking and well researched. When the fuselage of your Buffalo breaks apart, you can see the internal structure and it is painted zinc chromate. The flight model feels like a PC sim, although even with the settings dialed to max realism, it is more forgiving. Spins are too easy to recover, and when the game awarded me a successful carrier landing on the fifth or sixth try, I was surprised because I was pretty sure I was too high and hot and missed all the wires.

The narration and tutorial instructions in the game are voiced by actor Stephen Fry. He does a fair job, but it feels a bit weird being instructed on flying your F4F by a bloke with an English accent. It's sort of a reverse Pearl Harbor thing where instead of Matt Damon teaching the Brits how to fly their Spitfires, a Brit is teaching you how to fly your Wildcat. Anyway, if they wanted a Brit to voice the game, they should have hired James May of Top Gear. He'd have put more enthusiasm into it, and would never have referred to the throttle overboost as "afterburner."

The game is highly configurable with the ability to set individual realism options and customize missions. It is visually beautiful, especially the weather effects and water modeling. Flak and flame effects are also good, and it puts a lot of enemies in the sky, giving you a sense of a furball in the way that only European Air War managed for the PC. You can switch between third-person and first-person (with or without well-modeled cockpit interior) views, and have the HUD show you where all the baddies are or switch it all off. Flying and fighting with the obstructed cockpit view and all the ahistorical "radar" aids turned off is literally an eye-opener as you sit there tensely waiting to get bounced.

The worst thing about the game is that aircraft, and less importantly paint schemes and decorations, must be unlocked gradually by being purchased with points won by achieving various objectives. It's an unwelcome Grand-Theft-Auto-like element that may not bother most gamers but is irritating for PC sim buffs. Worse, the ways to accumulate points quickly are to play online in mulitplayer mode or to run through the campaigns on the arcade-like easy difficulty settings, neither of which interests me. So I'll be shooting carrier approaches and refining my acro routine in my Wildcat for quite a while before I get around to bagging enough Zeros to unlock most of the other planes. I think this limitation does not exist in the earlier Il-2 port, which is reason enough to buy that game as well, besides which it is now very cheap and has more elaborate European scenarios.

Overall the game is a real hoot. I had almost given up simming because my poor old PC struggled to maintain a decent frame rate on the last couple of generations of programs, but every now and then I would fire up European Air War with one of its many modded campaigns for a decent shootout. Birds of Steel is more realistic than EAW but more accessible than the serious PC sims. It's just about the ideal game for a warbird buff who had to get his kids an Xbox anyway. And the price is right -- currently $24 used at Gamestop, and probably headed for their $18 price point in the next few months.

And as for the kids -- well, my 8-year-old has been properly raised, he's seen more than his share of Mustangs and Spitfires, and he wants the controller as soon as I'm done with it.

August