Many among us have heard stories of the allied pilots’ heroic exploits during the Second World War as they mounted aerial offensives against the German Luftwaffe. Many WWII flight action games have appeared throughout the years and attempted to allow ‘would be’ pilots the chance to experience this era of human history. Heroes Over Europe is the latest in this long line of WWII era flight action titles and, regrettably, doesn’t quite measure up to other games in the genre.
Heroes Over Europe errs on the side of more arcade flight action rather than a traditional flight sim. There are two different control setups to cater to different playing styles. The professional setup is a traditional twin stick control scheme for flight sim purists while the other “arcade” setup is much more accessible for flight action newcomers and seems to be more fitting for the game’s action oriented gameplay.
A healthy array of WWII era fighters and fighter/bombers are included in the game’s roster of allied and Luftwaffe planes including the workhorse P-51D Mustang, incredibly agile de Havilland Mosquito and the heavily armed, torpedo deploying Fairey Swordfish.
With so many planes, dogfighting is, unsurprisingly, a large focus in Heroes Over Europe. There’s something special about lining up a fleeing FW 190 in your targeting reticule and unleashing a rain of machinegun fire until they go down in flames. To aid in such pursuits, as you’re lining up your target, a small red dot will be displayed near their craft, to help lead your shot.
Lending itself well to the more arcade centric nature of the game is the “Ace Kill” feature, which slows down time for a brief moment and zooms in on an enemy plane. To activate the feature, you’ll need to keep a rival fighter in your sights long enough for a gauge around your reticule to fill. Once it is half full, the Ace Kill mode is ready to be activated. Once zoomed in, several weak points on the plane will be highlighted in yellow, ranging from the engine(s), ammo boxes along the wings and even the pilot himself. Basic enemy fighters such as the Me-109 go down in one precise shot to any of the highlighted areas while bombers and other large aircraft can take more punishment. If you allow the gauge to completely fill, you’ll be able to chain together ace kills as the gauge slowly depletes.
The campaign does a decent job of keeping you compelled to press on with an impressive amount of variety in your objectives. For instance, in one mission, you’ll find yourself escorting a squadron of B-17 bombers and protecting them from threats from both outside their formation and within. In the next, you’ll be dive bombing German radar towers and then have to get the heck out of dodge by flying low to the ground through the streets of Berlin as flak explodes overhead and enemy fighters rain down 20mm shells in a desperate attempt to shoot you down.
Things become a bit hectic during most of the campaign’s 14 missions. You’ll have to grow accustomed to multitasking during missions because there are moments when you’ll have two or three critical mission objectives, all needing your attention at once. At that point, you’ll have to find a way to be in two places at once. Frustration quickly sets in during these instances and makes missions seem more tedious than entertaining.
Some design oddities immediately stand out and take away from the experience. First of all, there’s no cockpit view, which limits the sense of immersion. Collision detection is a bit off as well; most commonly demonstrated by enemy fighters that happen to fly into your path. When the two planes collide, they will sometimes stick together and spiral out of control toward the ground, all the while slowly damaging each other in the process. Ramming, while a very unwise tactic seems to be encouraged here, as one of the achievements involves destroying three bombers by flying directly into them and while this doesn’t usually result in instant death, it just doesn’t make sense as a viable offensive option.
Adding an extra layer of challenge to the campaign, there are a few boss fights thrown in for good measure. I’m sure a few of you out there are thinking, “Well, this could work. They’re bound to be the most exciting battles in the game, right?” Sadly, these battles don’t pan out nearly as well as expected. The AI has a few quirks that create less than thrilling battles. These “Ace pilots” all employ the same “fly directly at you, guns blazing, pass and repeat” tactics with very little deviation. It’s also a bit of a buzzkill that each one of the bosses can be taken down in one shot with the Ace Kill feature mentioned before. Sure, it’s much more difficult to keep your reticule trained on them than any of the other enemy pilots, but the fact remains that the battles can literally be won in a matter of seconds.
The multiplayer component is likely the weakest aspect of the game. While there is support for up to 16 players, which makes for some pretty exciting battles, the paltry three game modes (Dogfight, Team Dogfight and Survival) and four maps are bound to pretty quickly become old. With better multiplayer options out there, such as Ace Combat 6, it’s hard to imagine this game having any legs and just makes the multiplayer component seem like an afterthought.
The graphics engine powering Heroes Over Europe doesn’t impress much either. Plane models are well detailed and the European battlefields you’ll wage war over, ranging from rolling plains to the streets of London ravaged by German bombing runs are all recreated with an impressive sense of scale but nothing really stands out. Everything is only as detailed as it needs to be and the finer details are lost in a sea of textures that, while fine from a proper distance look pretty darn muddy up close. This is highlighted in the very first mission where you take off from the ground, making a disappointing first impression. It doesn’t help matters that the framerate occasionally drops at odd times and that there are sporadic pop in issues.
In comparison to other flight action titles, Heroes Over Europe just doesn’t measure up. What it does, it does only decently and never truly stands out. The campaign is entertaining but it’s too short to grab your attention for long and doesn’t ratchet up the intensity to the level I’d expect, despite its variety. The frustrating tendency to pile on the objectives far faster than you can complete them and a difficulty curve that spikes at odd points make for an experience that’s more frustrating than it is rewarding. Add in the weak multiplayer component and you have a game that seems like it could have been so much better, had some of these glaring flaws been addressed.
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