Heroes Over Europe

It’s fascinating to think that we’ve technically been playing WWII games far longer than the actual conflict took place, but rarely does it ever feel like that’s the case. After all, each game based on the conflict is new and varied, they only ever feel grating when one comes along that fails to technically recreate the sphere of conflict it’s focusing on. Forcing you to put up with muddy controls, uninspired visuals, irritating voice-overs and totally unfair level design and structure. Then, WWII becomes something that should be reserved for the history books, and possibly the odd documentary.

Heroes Over Europe focuses very much on the “Chocks away! We’ll be home in time for tea!”, recreation of war, and tries very hard to be an adventure story spanning multiple missions and characters, as you deal with the Nazi war machine’s bombardment of Europe. Missions tend to involve very little variety (sometimes even in their location) and it can all become familiar in a matter of minutes. The fact that visually Heroes Over Europe sits well below the benchmark of what has been achieved with other flight games should tell you that the experience on offer is rather more akin to a budget release. There’s really no excuse for graphics this bland to have slow down.

The crux of the gameplay centers on your ability to deal with multiple targets at once and to help you do this you’re able to make an ‘Ace Kill’, effectively enabling you to one shot your targets or take out specific parts like the engines or rear gunners. It feels fun at first but it quickly becomes apparent that the system is broken. The planes dodge and weave as they should and holding your reticule over them to charge up your ability is tough, but not being able to fire when doing so just seems idiotic, considering you could be taking them out without the special attack at all. Heroes will throw huge numbers of units at you and it rarely feels fare or even fun take them on. With boring missions coated in really quite awful designs there are far better WWII flight games that have been released in recent memory.