Project Wingman

Looks great, has a good variety of aircraft that are distinct in loadout and handling, constantly target rich environment. Explosions everywhere. Smoke trails, missiles, tracers. The controls are well thought out, gamepad worked perfectly straight away. Views, targetting etc are all simple. It's samey in the sense that every mission involves destroying a list of targets, but that's the gameplay right, that's what you're here for. It's plenty of fun. I went through the campaign start to finish in 3 sittings and I'll probably play it again. Missions are fairly long but I could always do another one. Next time I'll use different planes. If you want to feel like a top gun, zooming around and blowing stuff up, this is your game.

Do you like stuff like Ace Combat? Top Gun? That balls to the wall you taking on 6 boggies at once feeling, missiles flying every direction, the chaos of you chasing down a MiG-29 on FULL AFTERBURNER, and straffing ships and ground targets while breaking the sound barrier feeling? Well then this is a game you are probably going to like. This one is a budget title made by an ambitious indie team (of 2 mostly) who are fans of the Ace Combat series and boy does it show in all the best ways. Let's start with the action, you get the full feeling of speed and chaos, enemies, missles, and AA fire coming from every direction, air to air feels great, enemies can evade well and give a good challenge head to head and air to ground/ship is good fun and a challenge, missles and guns feel like they have impact, the exlposions look great. Next is the way the planes fly, and they feel great the SK-25U (Su-25 Frogfoot) is a slow tanky ground attacker bristling with weapons to tear up everything under it, it's stable at low speeds and altitudes, now take another, the F/D-14 (F-14D) a big supersonic interceptor that turns hard and is blistering in a strait line, it FEELS like you are breaking the sound barrier and pulling G's chasing MiG's like Maverick. Now a quick note, you may have noticed I didn't just use the real names of the aircraft you can fly, why? Well, they couldn't afford to license them so, they made small visual changes and slightly changed the names, you'll still recognize the planes though. And boy is the line up great and do they look sweet! Great's like the F-15D, MiG-31, F-4E, even the Avero Arrow is here to party. The game has 2 modes ro play as well adding to the value, Campaign and Conquest. Campaign is a serviceable story with some pretty good missions, where Conquest is a perma death mode where you start as a lone pilot and build a force BUT when you die you start over. Overall I give thish one a thumbs up, definately worth a buy for the asking price.

Gameplay is extremely good but sometimes it feels like missions go on way longer than it needs to be. Story doesn't really pick up until around mission 15 and the soundtrack is serviceable with only a few amazing songs here and there. The biggest positive is its accessability though. You can configure the FOV, fully customize the controls to your liking. It works with practically any flight stick plus there's also accessbility controls for mouse and keyboard! The game offers mouse aim flight which is basically War Thunder controls. This right here automatically makes War Thunder obsolete for me. There are still some negatives like how some of the voice acting can sound a bit mediorce at times. Your character won't move their legs whenever you yaw. The targeting system will sometimes not work with you. There's also no checkpoint system which can sting if you get shot down at the last second. There's also a user telemetry option in place. Just turn it off.

I'm a lifelong PC gamer, barely play any console games, AND I played this with a keyboard & mouse- and I still had a ton of fun. It's definitely arcadey, physics doesn't mean a whole lot. It's sort of a shooting gallery game in some ways, you'll kill infinity more enemies than you get killed, but it does feel like a cool flying game. The planes handle really differently - when I finally could afford a prototype-type plane, the difference in handling was incredibly obvious. It's fun choosing the right plane for the mission based on how you like to play. It does have a console style "finish the mission or restart" thing, though most are 20-30 minute max. It's still frustrating when you run into the wing of an airship or something. I literally beat a level and accidentally rammed into the ground (there's no artificial horizon). It's a short game, but that feels nice. I'm a busy adult, I've finished a handful of games in the past few years, it's nice to be able to actually go from start to finish in less than a lifetime. I finished the campaign, I'll have to play with conquest mode next. It's sometimes a bit hard to follow the deeper metaplot too, which is mostly communicated through radio messages while you're trying not to get shot down, but it was still a well done story overall.

As an avid AC fan, I once tried to play every flying game I could, particularly PS1 & 2 games. Most had long since faded into obscurity while AC reigned supreme, & I soon realized why: most of them SUCKED. PW... is not one of those games. It's also not AC, and that's great. It blows my mind that all of this was made by 3 people. I haven't had as much fun on a first-time play of a game in YEARS as I did with PW. Some highlights: Hardpoints add choice & much-needed versatility; no more getting stomped because I flew an attacker for a strike mission & got jumped by a boss. Battles are insane; so many enemies, tracers, missile trails, & explosions that I can't even see and my GPU is melting. Airships add variety to air combat and actually make MLAAs viable for once. A guns-only superplane is a baller design choice. The AOA limiter is ridiculous & silly & I love it. I would die for Prez. It's not perfect: Bad menu controls, little mission variety, no time pressure, no grades/unlocks to drive replays, minimal cutscenes or flair, no hangar ammo counts, poor weapon balance, tons of spelling/grammar errors, subtitle mismatch, bad line reads, uneven story writing, framerate chugs in big fights, all skins unlock all at once; files (lore dumps) are VERY uneven on who gets one, when they unlock, & how much they reveal; the unique credits dialog - the ONLY reward for beating Merc - is unintelligible due to the music, etc, etc. Merc also kinda blows: already long missions become grueling spamfests with too few unique additions; extra aces are just a name - with no dialog, bios, skins, or even extra $, they're just a nuisance; missions give the same meh reward & even playing all lower difficulties doesn't net enough $ to afford the Mk.1, which is basically essential for Merc. Small issues that just pile up & hurt replays, easy to fix if only PW ever got updated. Still ABSOLUTELY worth a buy, even at full price. Runs great on Linux w/ Proton 9.0-2 & "protontricks d3dcompiler_47"