WWII Aces Wii
WWII Aces is the arcade style World War II shooter with plenty of air action in a huge variety of planes across 72 missions in three campaigns.
Ratings: Graphics & Audio: 15/25, Gameplay: 16/25, Creativity 15/25, Fun 16/25
Total: 62/100
Running headlong into the German front lines in your tiny airplane alone may not seem like the smart thing to do but in a World War II arcade shooter it often is just what happens. WWII Aces is the Wii game from Destineer and Arcade Moon that pits you against your enemies across three expansive campaigns.
You start off the challenge of the Wii controlled planes in one of three campaigns using a single fighter. Each campaign will get more difficult and involved but to start things off simply you have simple missions to go along with the simple controls and scheme of the game.
The entire game is arcade styled and I think too many people confuse the arcade flight simulation or shooter with a real flight sim. The arcade part means many of the flight characteristics will not be exactly realistic and often tend to either help or hurt the pilot in their attempt to complete missions.
I personally enjoy many of the arcade flight games that have come out and see nothing wrong in bringing the genre to the Wii console. WWII Aces does a decent job of immersing you into World War II and throwing some hefty and often impossible missions at you.
Each campaign will start off in a simple fighter and move on to other types of airplanes from that country; you have the German, Russian and British campaigns to get each perspective on the war. The missions do not really lend a sense of time to the war as they are often not very realistic or taken straight from the history books but give enough of a variety and difficulty to make any flyer want more.
The campaigns move you along in a rather lackluster way but there will be plenty to bomb or attack on your missions. The campaign is mostly bombing runs or defensive against attackers but the game does a decent job with all it had to work with. The control scheme works fairly well and the planes handle very well to the controls while you’re playing. I had no problem picking up the Wii remote and handling the plane through the tutorial mission right from the start.
While the game does lack a regular variety to the missions or a great graphics look it does an adequate job of getting the Wii into an arcade type flying sim. The Wii is not exactly the best game for a three dimensional type environment but they did a decent enough job with the controls and being able to handle some of the neater moves like side rolls or loops.
Just by hitting the side bar on your pad or a simple flipping motion will send your plane into a roll or loop to get out of the way of enemy fire or have them in front of you to turn the tide of a fight. The action is sometimes pretty heavy from the standpoint of too many enemies on the screen at once but the Wii handles many on screen opponents just fine without any lag or frame rate drops.
Other than the campaign you can also shoot it out with others in the dogfight mode that uses any planes to fight against others from the computer or a second person in the split screen mode. The dogfight has three types in any of the theatres of battle with the Time Attack, Master of the Sky and Fly or Die.
The Time Attack is your basic shoot out to eliminate as many opponents in a time limit where you get to choose the time, appearance rate and difficulty. The Master of the Sky lets you choose how many opponents you need to shoot down before you get knocked out and the Fly and Die is simply how many opponents you can shoot down. All three modes are a variation on the same theme and it really makes little difference between them, mainly the dogfight is a quick battle mode.
The graphics were fine but when you switch to the split screen for multiplayer the quality drops down some more and was a bit of a disappointment. The multiplayer is fine and plays well but only includes head to head or coop play with another person sitting beside you.
WWII Aces is a pretty decent arcade flight sim but nothing to brag about or get too excited with, it has pretty decent graphics and works fine but there was nothing very outstanding or well done. WWII Aces is certainly playable and with the lack of many flight games on the Wii console it is worth a look at for arcade flight sim enthusiasts.