Wings of Prey: Special Edition

DRM free in theory but all they've done is remove the multiplayer menus and cd requirements. Game is completely stripped of all its Co-op features. The game itself has a wonderful soundtrack and immersive single-player missions. A huge assortment of aircraft and nice graphics. There are much better sim games out there for realism but Wings of Prey is fun compromise and has a variety of options to choose from. The game also supports Ultra-wide resolutions and I have had no issues configuring various types of joysticks and controls in the options menu.

The game is made by the same studio who went on to make War Thunder and in some ways it feels like a stepping stone to that game. It looks great, the soundtrack seems properly awesome, the plane library seems to cover all the major planes found on the western front (none from the pacific though - as far as i can tell). For two euros i'd say it's a must buy if you have any sort of interest in flight games.

The graphics are really good for an old game, i was impressed with the visuals. The gameplay and atmosphere is also on point, while not a simulation it is quite realistic for what is a more 'arcadey' and action focused ww2 aircraft game. My only issue is that playing with an xbox controller it shows prompts for keyboard/mouse controls in the tutorials. And in the controls menu it lists the buttons as 'button 8' 'button 15' etc so it requires a bit of trial and error before you know what you're doing.

I'm writing this review to inform people that the game doesn't properly launch with more than 16 threads/cores in Windows. Disable Hyper Threading or similar in BIOS or use msconfig.exe to limit the maximum number of processors to 16.

This is a pretty decent arcade to moderate realism flight game. It has two problems - 1. It doesn't know if it wants to be an arcade game or a sim. It's ported from an console game, but you can fly it with a "realistic" mode and it's only a bit less realistic than a game like il2. But the missions are crafted more towards arcade more. 2. You have to progress through the missions linearly, and some of them have issues. One is basically unfinishable in arcade mode, one will randomly have the scripting break and just stop giving you objectives but never finish. The graphics are nice, you can fly full HOTAS or you can fly with a gamepad or mouse, and it's pretty accessible and runs smooth and well. It's just got some frustrations because it's not quite a game, not quite a flight sim, and will break your flow by you needing to work around issues to play the full 15 mission campaign. For the sales price you'll get your money's worth.