If only war was this easy…
Smartphone games being what they are, a title has to stand out with the amount of derivatives that are currently on the market. Set within WWII, War Wings is a competitive aerial shooter aimed exclusively for Android and IOS devices. Playing on a Sony Xperia XZ, I’ll be discussing whether War Wings is capable of firing up the propellers, and ultimately whether it’s worth your time.
If there’s one thing that I hate more than Marmite or Ed Miliband, it’s microtransactions. Unfortunately in the modern gaming climate, the market is currently saturated with the bloody things. Surfacing at some point in 2011, microtransactions have been the bane of every honest gamer since; initially starting out with the likes of Candy Crush Saga leading up to nearly every AAA console release adopting the questionable business model. War Wings released on the Google Play Store a few weeks ago in the UK, and while the subject matter is something I can appreciate, I can’t help but think it’s tainted somewhat due the business model that it represents.
War Wings is a competitive aerial shooter set within WW2, featuring historically accurate planes that the player can take into 4×4 real-time PvP Dogfights. The Game begins with you selecting a starting plane, all of which have their own stats and aesthetics. I myself went with the Heinkel He 51B-1, which sported the Balkenkreuz on either side of the top supporting plane. Soon after plane selection, the game invites you to join a competitive match using the quick game feature; once in, the controls for the plane are surprisingly simple where they could have been overly complex. Unfortunately the gameplay follows suit, with the dogfights being nothing more than the same 4×4 deathmatch over and over, offering very little variation. The biggest challenge that the gameplay possesses lies within closing the gap between the enemy plane and your own, and as soon as this is done and you begin to shoot, the camera locks on to the enemy plane which allows you to shoot them down with pin point accuracy, further taking away from the gameplay.
The combat in War Wings is ridiculously simple…
Unfortunately like a lot of mobile games most of War Wing’s content is hidden behind a paywall, with the most expensive “Microtransaction” coming it at a whopping £96.99, which is downright ridiculous. War Wing’s only saving grace is the attention that’s gone it to making the planes look and feel like their real life counterparts, with planes like the already aforementioned Heinkel He 51B-1 and Curtiss F11C Goshawk – Hawk II variant being the most notable of the bunch.
Overall I wasn’t very impressed with War Wings; the subject matter could have made for a great little game, but what we got was another carbon copy of nearly every other Smartphone game out there, offering very little variation in its gameplay and locking the vast majority of its content behind a ‘pay to win’ microtransaction paywall.
