Wings of Prey

[JRD]

Ok... this one got my attention real bad  :-*

Wings of Prey is a WWII air combat arcade/simulator.
So far, I only played the demo and it is great.

GRAPHICS
The game looks awesome... plane models are very nice, clouds, sky, sun and light/shadows are beautyfull. The ground is extremely detailed. I managed to fly over the port of Dover under a heavy bombing and I could see the city in nice details, the port with lots of ships and the countryside with crops, farms and small houses. I could see the bombs falling to hear the sound latter on. Fire was ok (not FarCry-ish, but good). I saw bombs falling on the water and making a large splash. When you hit an enemy the damage model is very good with parts flying over and a trail of black smoke and parachutes... nice visual indeed!! Good attention to details: guns sound different when you hear them from inside or outside the cockpit and they sound badass guns  ;) . I was shot but not downed, having holes on my wigs I kept till the end of mission

DIFFICULTY
three level of difficulty: arcade, realistic and simulator. Arcade mode is very, very forgiving and you can fool around as you want, you'll hardly stall or crash. Realistic is a bit tougher, but doable, something inbetween both extremes. Simulator was impossible to me. I stalled and crashed and couldn't hit more than a couple of bombs on my target... in this level of difficulty you get to control absolutely everything in the plane; fuel mixture, radiator temperature, G-force will make you fade etc... and is very hard to keep your bird steady to a smooth kill.
On any level of difficulty you can choose to take off and land or start on air, ready to fight!

TUTORIAL
Three lessons with basics of flying, navigation and combat.
Way points (in arcade and realistic modes only) appear as yellow floating flags. Enemies are marked in red and friends in blue. Arrows on your screen show you where they are without making the screen a carnival (good choice of colors and tones). Lock on a target and you get a camera view on you bottom right corner where you see an image of your target. If its a fighter, you get to see the cockpit and the pilot's face, if your mission is to bomb something, you see your ground target.
You can see your airplane as in 3rd person view, or your cockpit with all details on your controls with nice shadows as you fly. Move your controls and you see movement in the cockpit. Or in a HUD view, where you can aim and shoot better.

DEMO
You have two missions: Deffend Dover against german bombers and another one where you have to bomb some german city (by the way, the whole campaign takes place in Europe, no Pacific theatres). Pretty easy to accomplish on arcade... challenging but doable on realistic mode and very hard on simulation mode  :-X

So far its only available for download (since december 25th) on STEAM and on YuPlay for nasty US$49,99  :(

Not sure if it will make to the stores as a retail version... which is pretty annoying, actually... some members here like to have what they pay for on a nicely done DVD boxset and not on a virtual product.

PC only, of course, but apparently is the PC version of a PS3/XBOX version of a game called Birds of Prey, which seems to be the same thing with only voice overs different (go figure). If any PS3ers out there are familiar with the title, post your thoughts!!
Cheers all

[Art Blade]

Thanks for the nice review, JRD  :-X

Made me think back of AoE which I really liked. Shame it's download only, really.

[JRD]

The beta version was releasd just before the downlodable version and I saw some recent posts on forums complaining about this DL-only option.

[fragger]

Thanks for the detailed write-up, JRD. Sounds like a cool game, but the DL-only factor may make me balk. Hell, what am I saying, it will make me balk. Hopefully they'll retail it, because if they do, I'll be in it.

[PZ]

Nicely detailed, JRD  :-X

[Art Blade]

I just read a nice recommendation in my favourite PC mag about this game. They say it's retail and Steam, and that there is a DLC available for the Steam version only (doesn't w@&k with the retail version). They say the planes are great, detailed cockpits etc, and best play on Easy for a quick shoot, while higher difficulty levels make flying more difficult (lol, simply put). They say it is time to dig out your flight sticks  :)

I'll take a look next time when I visit my local games shop. Mmmmmh :)

[Art Blade]

Hmm, the 2nd vid (see link below) is 9 months old.. PC version.. well, the mag I was referring to isn't a gaming mag, they do recommend good games even if they are not that new. Strange I never noticed the game when I was in the games shop.. probably didn't remember the title ;)

Here a short version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bHkDdTJvK8

and a longer one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19hYotdEb3s

The quote is from the guy who submitted the 2nd vid which looks like he just played for the first time. Like we would :) (I watched and liked a couple of his playthroughs already)

Wings of Prey PC Gameplay 1920X1080 Maxed Out Settings Win 7 HD
Wings of Prey, a new World War II flight combat simulator for the PC by Gaijin Entertainment.

Minimum System Requirements For Wings of Prey

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP SP3
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3200MHz
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Hard Drive: 10 GB of free space
Video Card (graphics): NVIDIA GeForce 7600 256 Mb or ATI Radeon X1650 256 Mb
DirectX: DirectX 9.0c
Sound card: DirectX compatible
Internet connection: 56 kb/s
Keyboard, mouse


The Recommended Requirements For Wings of Prey

Operating System:Microsoft Windows XP SP3 / Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 / Microsoft Windows 7
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2400 MHz
Memory: 2 GB RAM or more
Hard Drive: 10 GB of free space
Video Card (graphics): NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 512 Mb or ATI Radeon 4850 512 Mb.
DirectX: DirectX 9.0c
Sound card: DirectX compatible with support 5.1
Internet connection: 512 Kb/s
Keyboard, mouse, joystick

[fragger]

Thanks for that Art, it might be worth a look. I haven't played a good WW2 flight sim for a while, that is, a proper sim where you're in the cockpit and not flying along behind your plane.

I'll have to dust off the old stick of joy, if I can find the flipping thing. It's hiding in a closet somewhere in the house.

I'll check out those clips too when my net isn't going up and down like a yoyo :D

[Art Blade]

hehe :)

The vids basically show that the landscape is detailed enough to believe that you're actually flying over landscape rather than a digitised oil painting and landscape with houses down there doesn't look like a feta cheese-strewn salad. Yes, I'm referring to Heroes over Europe. Also, you actually get a proper cockpit and can look around (smoothly, I hope the game recognises a coolie hat on a flight stick). The planes looked good in the vids, but that I knew from the mag's recommendation already. I'm definitely considering to get that game, I loved dogfights back in the day of games like Aces over the Pacific or Aces over Europe (while I still shudder when thinking back about HoE).

[JRD]

I still have the demo installed on my lap top and even though I can't run it maxed out, the graphics look very nice. Gameplay is very cool also and you can choose views from inside cockpit or outside and use the mouse to look around.

[PZ]

Anyone know if the map is actually Europe or is it a make-believe world?  Can you play open world style, or do you need to follow missions?

[Art Blade]

good questions. I don't know if I can get this game (not going to buy from Steam) but if I can, I'd very much like to write about it here. I don't know if the demo offers enough detail, but anyone who's already got experience with the game, particularly the full version, is very welcome to tell us something about the game :)

[JRD]

The demo plays a battle over Dover, UK. For what I've seen it resembles the place very well. The harbor, the white chalck cliffs and the terrain are great. Don't know if it was made out of real terrain models though.

As for openworldness, you can play as you want as long as you don't get too far from the fight (if you do I don't know what happens, maybe a mission fail sort of thing). Every time I play I fool around a lot to see the visuals, flying low to check the terrain or getting close to enemies to see the models etc... I only completed the demo a couple of times. The battle seems to go on regardless of your actions and nobody bothered me for not doing my job. I even flew away towards the ocean and back to have a panoramic view
from the scenario!  8)

[PZ]

Thanks for the info - sure looks like a great game graphics-wise.

[fragger]

The battle seems to go on regardless of your actions and nobody bothered me for not doing my job.

Sometimes I get concerned that games like this can be a bit too realistic in that regard. I'm reminded of Jane's WW 2 Fighters, which was a great sim (although ground textures were very plain), but the trouble was that because of the speeds you were doing, you could very easily find yourself miles from the battle very quickly and all the other aircraft would end up being too far away to see, so you'd end up flying by yourself and not knowing where the battle had gone. This was a phenomenon that used to happen to WW2 fighter pilots in reality, btw - one minute they'd in a twisting, turning dogfight, the next minute they'd wouldn't be able to find anybody. Since fighters had no sophisticated radar or guidance systems in those days to establish where they were in relation to their comrades, even thought they may be in radio contact, often they wouldn't have any way of finding the battle again so they'd just go home alone. A relief maybe in reality, but a bit of an anticlimax in a computer game.

There was a tracking-type option in the Jane's game that you could use to determine where everybody had gotten to (a red arrow would appear on the screen to tell you where to go), but being a bit of a purist when it comes to WW2 sims, I'm not crazy about that sort of thing. Real pilots of the period certainly didn't have anything like that kind of assistance.

So for games of this nature, I like ones where the action is relatively brief and localized, such as with the old  Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator. From what you guys have reported, it sounds like Wings of Prey might be a similar game, in which case I'm all for it.

And cheers for the info thus far, all :-X

[Art Blade]

Thanks for your post, very interesting :)

Just one thing about Wings of Prey: You get to fly either British or Russian planes (it's a Russian game alright).

For the Steam download game version (exclusively for it) you get a DLC which I believe also gives you something else to fly.. German planes? Not sure though which ones, but there is an additional option.

Re: other WWII flight games.

I used to play AoP/AoE (Aces over the Pacific/over Europe) back in the days of 386/486 PCs, hehe, and those games were great with regards to dogfights. Man, I love dogfights. It  sometimes happened that some enemy and I kept chasing each other in turns, which was caused by clouds in which we got lost and found in turns. I remember one time, when I finally managed to shoot down the enemy plane, I was alone. That chase had taken me places the war probably hadn't extended to until I showed up. Needless to say it was a stupid situation to keep flying around for hours to get the mission complete signal, so that usually meant "do it again." :)

[JRD]

I didn`t get lost in the demo because I knew where Dover was and the geography was quite good to get your bearings (shoreline, cliffs, etc). You also can have tags at the planes flying, so even if you are really far from the action, you`ll see a bunch of red and blue letters (enemy and friendly) gathered somewhere in the sky. There is also a minimap, so you don`t get lost - in the demo.

@Art... WoP has already 8 patches released, two addons (Kittyhawk and Luftwaffe historical decals -  adds authentic historical decals -swastika instead of crosses- for Luftwaffe planes.)

DLC (US$15,00) available is a Luftwaffe package containing:

- Take to the skies as a German pilot;
- Embark on 10 new missions;
- Cooperative mode for up to four players;
- New planes: the Ju 88 A-4 and the P-39N-0;
- 44 new skins for the various planes.

Also, prices came down a bit - from a nasty US$49,99 to a salty US$39,99

[Art Blade]

Thanks for the info, JRD :)

Because I don't buy from Steam, I bought it today from my favourite local dealer. Along with other games ;) I'll keep you posted, but it might take a little, not going to install them right away.

[PZ]

Looking forward to screen captures and impressions  ;)

[JRD]

No German DLC for the German guy then?  :-D

Looking forward to a review!  ;)

[Art Blade]

cheers guys.. after all I read, this here got the most responses.. I'll install it first.  :-X

[fragger]

Cool!

[PZ]

Screencaps - we want screencaps!  :-D

[Art Blade]

Yes, I'd love to post screenies :) Can't stand games that neither have a function for that of their own nor allow progs like IrfanView to capture the screen, like JC2. Bloody annoyance, that.

[PZ]

Indeed - rather stupid of the developers, I'd say.  Allowing people to post screen captures/video would only expand interest in their game.  Making screen/video captures part of the program would only encourage such passive marketing.