Heroes over Europe

Tally-ho! Pip-pip! What?!

Ubisoft and its stable of developers is having bit of a love affair with World War II. We can't blame them, really - for certain kind of war-nerd, it's the ultimate war. There's clear bad guys, some great technologies, and at the same time it was still a war where the combatants - for the most part - had to look one another in the eye. We're as partial to a bit of WWII action as the next man, so we had high hopes that Heroes Over Europe would love up to its stable-mates, R.U.S.E (not yet released, but we have faith it'll be awesome) and Order of War (which we've previewed, and quite like).

HoE (read it, don't say it) is very much a modern arcade flyer. It has to be arcade, if it's going to be popular on the Xbox - there's just not enough controls to spare to offer the same level of detail that a PC-based flight sim can deliver (anyone here remember Falcon 4.0?). But that doesn't mean it has to be a dumbed down experience...

In theory.

Jam and biscuits!
Each level of each campaign - and that should get warning bells going right there - opens with a tacky yet charming newsreel-style bit of exposition explaining the state of war. It's all "give that man a coconut, grandma" style faux-British reporting, but it does its job. Similarly, there are some rather moody animations that introduce what your character is doing at that point in time.

'You', by the way, is a young American pilot who's lied about being Canadian so he could get into the RAF, at least in the first campaign. We're guessing this is one of those things where someone's decided that British accents don't play well in the states, so let's make an American flyer. Sure, many Americans did join up early on to fight the Hun, but it's it comes off as an annoying contrivance in the game.

But you're not playing HoE (remember what we said) for the story.

You're playing it get into the air and smash the Luftwaffe, and the first mission is the obligatory training level, full of aircraft that are too posh to dodge and an annoying flight leader (who is of course a bitter veteran of WWI).

The mission begins with you on the ground, which is always a nice sign in flight sims, but the juicy take-off we were expecting could be handled by a two-year old. Your superior is obviously bent on terrifying the local French, and gets you to buzz a church, a village an old castle - 'cause nothing shows your flying chops like scaring cows, apparently.

Then it's on to a ludicrously un-escorted flight of German bombers, and once they're destroyed it's time to take out their heinously late fighter escort. "Gee," thought I, all we need is a lonely vehicle convoy" and... bam! There one was! With that out of the way, it's time for a proper furball - with baddies that actually shoot back - and your introduction to the game and its mechanics is complete.

But the rage will simmer on.

You see, this is WWII by way not only of the arcade, but also arcade shoot-em-ups. For instance, your shooting is somehow more powerful if you're power-diving on a target. You've also got a focus-mode, where time slows so you can achieve 'ace kills', and you can even chain these kills together to achieve more focus-time.

What's even more annoying than finding these kinds of cheap tricks in my favourite war, is the fact that without them, much of the secondary missions are impossible, and even the primary missions will be pushed if you just want an old fashioned dogfight.

Crikey!
Still, the controls, once you get used to them, are quite responsive. You manoeuvre, in the Xbox version, with the left thumb stick, while the right controls the throttle and yaw.

It's at times counter-intuitive, but after a few false-starts (and charred French villagers) we stopped ploughing into the ground and extracted quite a degree of control out of the game - more than enough to stick on the tail of a wildly dodging ME-109 and send it flaming into the deck.

But those village-smashing incidents are easy to do - there's no altimeter to speak of, or an fact any instruments. The only view is over the shoulder (or wing, really), or not quite over the shoulder (or wing, really). So when you're in a cloud-bound furball, it's very easy to totally lose perspective, only to find yourself accelerating into a baguette factory.

Bother.

Flying is boring
Yes, we said it. There are two tricks that flight sim designers can employ to make flying interesting - burying you in real-world detail, or making you the center of whatever Godforsaken conflict you're flying in.

Arcade games tend to take that second approach, since you simply cannot embed detail into a simple flying engine. HoE (it's not getting any better, is it?) takes simplicity to the nth degree - it doesn't even model ammunition expenditure, for the love of Goering!

So, instead, you get missions where you've got to patrol early warning stations (and yeah, there's some tongue-in-cheek banter about how ironic this is), before seeing off a surprise attack on an Allied convoy (which looks like it's a convoy out of France - but don't ask), and then defending a fuel dump from another surprise attack, before - ignominy of ignominies - being tasked with clearing mines from the convoy's path.

Quite possibly I yelled something about "Where's the fucking Royal Navy, you 'tards!" before storming off in a huff.

Arcade doesn't have to mean dumb, and there are many great flight sims, of all kinds of historical and make-believe flavours that deliver an engaging and in-depth experience. Heroes Over Europe, however, is not one of them.