Highly Compressed Wings Of War PC Game ~ GamesNHacks

Hammad Ansari on Monday, January 24, 2011

Wings Of War | PC Game | Genre: Combat Sims | {479MB}

High-speed combat, high intensity action, and high-flying heroes rule the skies in Wings of War. All of the deadly drama and intense aerial duels of WWI will blast the PC as history's greatest flying aces take to the air. As rookie pilot Benjamin, you must prove your mettle against kings of the skies, and choose your destiny. Earn medals and ranks as you fight for your country under the service of your commanders. Seek fortune and glory as you take on side quests. The choice is up to you! The sky's the limit as you blaze a path to glory on Wings of War.

It is a historical setting and combat between realistic-looking period aircraft, about the only thing Wings of War has in common with a hardcore flight sim is that they both feature objects suspended in the air. At its default settings, the game's flight model is arcadelike and wildly forgiving (though you can tweak the controls to make them significantly more realistic, resulting in a game that's more difficult and more rewarding). It's almost impossible to stall the planes, you can bounce them off of obstacles with relative impunity, and, for the most part, they turn less like actual aircraft and more like the light cycles in Tron. They're also equipped with some distinctly non-period gear such as radar, shields, and missiles. On top of all this, the landscape is dotted with pickups that impart standard gamey bonuses like health and speed boosts. It's enough to give cranky flight sim fans a massive, collective stroke, but it's a solid foundation for a decent action game.

This simplified flight model would have benefited from mouse control. As it is, however, only keyboard and joystick controls are supported. The mouse can be used, but only to look around in cockpit view.

The game's campaign takes place across 12 huge levels, each one requiring at least an hour to complete. Rather than tell any sort of story, each level is simply a series of 20 or so vaguely connected tasks. Generally, they're doled out linearly, with your next task being assigned immediately upon completion of the current one. However, there are usually five or six optional bonus challenges that can be attempted at various points throughout each level. The variety of mission types is impressive: there's straight dogfighting, bombing runs, escort jobs, one-on-one duels, timed races, and even reconnaissance missions during which you'll snap pictures of ground targets. You'll also occasionally mount the rear gunner's position while a computer-controlled pilot flies the plane.

The tasks within a level are strung together with virtually no downtime between them, and except for the occasional timed or escort mission, you're generally free to take as long as you like to complete them. This gives you time to break off from the main fighting and scour the countryside looking for power-ups, which are either hidden inside destroyable objects, such as buildings and zeppelins, or placed inside open-ended hangars through which you need to fly. Not every enemy plane is part of a mission goal, either, and you'll often try to down a few in direct combat simply to keep them from harassing you during the mission. This open-ended structure leads to some pretty thrilling moments of risk versus reward as you fly defensively with a few planes on your tail, searching for a health or shield power-up that'll give you a better chance of finishing a particular task.

Once you've finished the campaign, there's also an instant action mode in which you can set up deathmatch or team deathmatch games with up to 29 other planes across a variety of terrain types, seasons, and times of day.