Wings of Prey: Special Edition

I bought this game on Steam. But the original DRM was really really bad. You could reinstall your game 10 times at most. Which is a shame as it is the kind of game you will want to comeback to. The game itself is really really good. The game is challenging without being a full simulation. The missions are varied. I had a lot of fun playing this one.

Wings of Prey tries to fill a larger niche than most flight simulators, but by doing so it fails fans of realistic flight simulators. Promo material for this game heavily emphasizes that it supports both arcade and simulator styles of play by offering a huge number of realism settings to balance the gameplay to your liking. Unfortunately, the game is balanced under the assumption you are playing with everything in full Arcade mode. AI controlled aircraft accelerate absurdly fast and almost always move at their maximum airspeed. You will need to fly with your throttle at full WEP at all times just to keep up with your flight leader. Since it can take you several minutes to reach your maximum airspeed during level flight when the realism settings are enabled, you have almost no hope of catching an enemy that is flying straight away from you. Although you can adjust the flight model for each mission, other realism settings are hardcoded into the missions. For example, the first mission in the campaign requires you to shoot down six HE-111's from your Hurricane Mk IIB. Since the idea of shooting down six bombers with a single load of underpowered .30 ammunition is laughable, you're given unlimited ammo for the mission. So much for realism. You can't adjust the AI difficulty for standalone or campaign missions, and the AI's combat prowess also is balanced as if you have the settings on full arcade. The more difficult AI opponents literally never miss and will kill you with a single quarter-second burst to the canopy as soon as you are in front of them *every single time*. Attempting combat in these missions is pointless. Enemy bombers always fly in a perfectly straight path and never undertake evasive maneuvers. However, their tail gunners have terrifying accuracy and your screen shakes violently every time you take a hit (no matter how insignificant the hit was) so it is almost impossible to shoot down a bomber. There is no time compression for skipping downtime.

I bought this game not from here and boy how ripped off I felt. Let me start for the best part from buying it from here: It has No DRM. The DRM in this game was one of the ugliest I've seen, you were able to install the game only 3 times then ask for permission to keep installing the game (WTF!). So buy it from here. This game is gorgeous, from the incredible soundtrack by Jeremy Soule (Morrowind, Skyrim), to the beautifully detailed aircraft sounds. The immersion provided by the game is astonishing, you'll see the moisture covering your windshield when you pass through a cloud, you'll feel the shock as enemy hits your aircraft, and you'll feel the adrenaline of dogfights like you never did. Flying feels realistic and intense. The bad part: The campaigns are not very well designed, and some missions are really unforgiving for new players, AI seems unbalanced. The ugly part: if you compare this game to it's older entry IL-2 Sturmovik 1946, you'll feel dissapointed in the lack of variety of planes, and mission editing options. This game feels like an arcade-ish approach compared to the previous entry.

I own this game on Steam, but it wouldn't launch anymore. I always hated the YuPlay DRM. I completed the Steam version when I could play it (on Windows 8.1 I think), and found it an enjoyable arcade flight sim. It also works with various flightsticks/joysticks/gamepads including Xbox controller, and Speedlink Black Widow. This GoG version works for me on Windows 10 (although not stated as a supported OS) and I've set it up as a shortcut on Steam as well. This allows me to launch the GoG version via SteamLink on a TV. Nice casual gaming.