"Wings" Of Prey (PC). Watchout Oleg!

[zakkandrachoff]

someone know when this going to be for sale in a Box??. I don't going to buy a download. I want something physic. and I see a Zero in the preview and in the game download are not the pacific theatre

[GF_Mastiff]

Wow! Right off the demo if the demo's this good. I like it already; another fine WWII flight sim/hybred for me. I'm buying it off of steam..
I'm just having a little difficulty with the input setting as far as the joysticks concerned. the Trk ir works perfect.

[Flanker35M]

S!

Mastiff, check the ready profiles in setup and work on them. That is how I did it on my Cougar. The demo is nice, gonna get the boxed version. Even if it is not a full blown sim, it is still a WW2 plane thingy = has a place on my shelf.

[MikkOwl]

I'm a 29 year old Swedish (of Finnish descent) hardcore appreciator of games/sims ever since I was a child (started in 1985, I've gone through many loved flying games in particular since. How about "Ace of Aces" on the Commodore 64 (flying Mosquotos, didn't even know what they were), F/A-18 Interceptor on the Amiga 500, F-19 Stealth Fighter (I still read the manual from time to time, great stuff), the master piece "Their Finest Hour" also on Amiga 500 (the manual was the best I've ever seen, a nicely bounded history book basically, with great pictures, pilot quotes etc). I'm driven by a big fascination with machinery, especially the flying kind, and history. Simming is great. Immersion is the key. I got IL-2 in 2002 but didn't fly it much due to various reasons, then bought 1946 last year. Now I have a TrackIR 5, Logitech G940 (a week old), Saitek Quadrant, decent monitor etc.

Anyway, Wings of Prey looked absurdly good in some of the videos I've seen on youtube. I've read interviews with the developers and comments from many who played it (and who didn't). Here's my demo impressions. I can't call it a review since I did not bother exploring everything.

It is graphically impressive overall. Especially the battle of berlin mission included in the demo. When it starts, and FPS is high, it's absolutely breathtakingly good looking. It's like crysis in the air, with a huge city looking completely convincing essentially and tons of battling going on. It has a large amount of atmosphere. There's so many planes, details, smoke plumes, clouds, etc that it's almost impossible to get a grip on who's who and what's going on down low over Berlin (which is in many ways a good thing). It becomes massively more demanding however as soon as any action/enemies appear, and that real amazing framerate + details is bogged down. There's in general though so many awesome effects that every flight sim should have, graphically. Long rendering distance, nice sun glare effect where the eyes adjust after a few moments, the cloud effects, rain.

However, the graphical effects venture into Hollywood-esque artistic license. The British environment looks nothing like that in real life (the color red appears to have been filtered out, what remains is shades of green and blue mostly). It's like those color filters they put on movies to give them a certain surreal look. It looks impressive but 'wrong'. The Berlin environment did look a lot more like reality however.

I was hoping that the Simulator mode would provide something approximating IL-2 levels of realism, but the game is just too different. The whole design/setup is like pretty similar to the Ace Combat series (which I have not played, but seen videos of and read about). But there's one game that really captures the essense of playing sim mode in Wings of Prey in the sim mode - Codemaster's "GRID" for consoles and PC, with just a tad bit less arcadish physics. It's almost as if they copied the whole concept and applied it to WW2 fighter planes instead of race cars.

It does attempt to cater to even hardcore people, but it fails in this regard. It's sim mode is more like a blend between arcade and hardcore simulation. This is not a bad thing, as I've already seen people gone from the arcade mode to being curious about the sim mode, and how those planes really worked and so on. We all had steps to climb to get to real simming levels.

There's basically no planning, no getting to read about your pilots, no dynamic campaigns, no realistic campaigns either, no choosing load-outs (as far as I'm aware), no flight plans with waypoints, no command structure (you are the leader of a flight and some scripted commanding figure over radio keeps giving you ever more ambitious odd targets), there's only four radio commands that can be given, no clearance to take off or land - just straight to the point. A GPS all-seeing radar map is always available no matter what realism setting, showing the bad guys, good guys and the targets, all clearly marked. You can take off if you want but it's not as in-depth as IL-2.

The mission goals seem to have unexpected elements and vary a lot, which isn't bad in itself, but it's way over the top. Follow the Battle of Berlin mission for example. You set out with a flight to attack an enemy make-shift airfield on the streets of Berlin (cool!). Although it shows up on the ultra-radar it was extremely hard to see it with your bare eyes. I could not despite many passes, and my wingmen eventually took it out (I couldn't tell). This continued being the theme, ground targets impossible to spot in the big real looking city. Before one can get to the airfield one is attacked by a bunch of 109's. Then the airfield. Then unexpectedly assigned to take out Tiger tanks in another part of the city. Then unexpectedly assigned to bomb a a fortified house. Then without any break it turned into flying escort duty for IL-2 Sturmoviks being attacked by more 109's. Actually, the 109's never seemed to stop coming during this whole time. Target after target being impossible to distinguish, as there had been no briefings, flight plans or warnings about what one is expected to carry out. The absurdity is that one was given a single drop of free-fall bombs for use against the airfield. Then what? Didn't have anything left for all the other targets. Kept bailing out and respawning in the air to get more bombs to drop on the targets. I didn't keep playing beyond the escort duty so I don't know how long it kept going with new over the top things. All these missions took place within a 2x2km radius pretty much, hyper intense, not a moment of non-combat or time to gather your wits. The british mission was somewhat similar in how it moved you from mission to mission in a single flight, but one did get the order to land to refuel and re-arm before proceeding to the next step. But everything is very close by, the map is very small. No need for time accel, or to keep a look-out (magic radar).

On to the more technical points:

- No Force Feedback. I had actually been inspired to try it hoping that it would have more proper force feedback than IL-2, which doesn't provide control resistance in the middle 33% of stick motion (what a bummer that is! My greatest wish is that they patch that in, along with twin throttle support).

- Setting up the controls was irritating (beyond the fact that they are lost each time one exits and reloads the demo) - most axis behaved opposite to how they would logically appear. I ended up with almost every axis acting the opposite way of what I intended (i.e. you'd think that seeing your stick move a dot up in the axis setup screen when you push a lever forward would mean that it 'increases' something like prop pitch, throttle, fuel mix, radiator etc, but the game thinks that moving down = more). There's also a whole lot of menus to navigate through back and forth when just doing a single small adjustment, every time.

- The weapons are very seriously different from reality. The rate of fire seems to be extremey low (perhaps 1/5 to 1/20th) of what it should be. The Spitfire has four 7.62mm machine guns that all fire at the same time each at a high rate of fire, with only some bullets being tracers. It's a bullet shower in real life. In Wings of Prey all the bullets that aren't tracers in real life don't exist at all - there's no sound FX for them and they don't seem to be fired at all either - only the tracered bullets exist, hit stuff, make a sound. Also only two of the four machine guns seem to make any sound and shoot things at all. As a result, shooting the four high RPM machine guns looks like and sounds not entirely disimilar to having two wing mounted MG/FF in IL-2, low rate of fire with big tracers, things flying between the projectiles due to low volume of fire. This might slip by people who do not posess any knowledge of firearms and airplane weaponry, but for me it's hard to swallow. My imperssion was that the projectiles moved slower through the air than IL-2. Part of this impression may be from the large size of projectiles and the low amounts of them. Hitting targets was quite difficult, more so than IL-2. The machine guns and cannons also seem to have unlimited ammo.

- The weapon damage to yourself and the enemy is fairly hardcore, but the 'system' seems far less advanced than IL-2. In the Berlin map I was blown out of the sky very quickly by the slightest hits, and enemy fighters and bombers would respond somewhat like in IL-2 to being hit, apart from being much harder to hit due to the extremely low volume of fire your planes output. Damage effects are supremely awesome looking, with great holes straight through the wing that looks convincing, oil spluttering on windshields and tons of things to that effect. Shooting cannons that hit the enemy's wing, you can actually see a nice explosion and completely convincing hole straight through the wing. On the negative side, it appeared to be mostly 'all or nothing', even very large holes and control surfaces missing on your own plane didn't seem to affect the plane much. Flight model seems mostlyunaffected by the large pieces of your airframe missing. I would fly around and not even realize half the wing area was missing until I later noticed those huge holes looking out the side of the canopy.

- Bail-outs are instantaneous. You can respawn instantly near you got taken out whenever you bail out, get killed or whatever. There's no consequences.

- The engines have nice controls assignable to axis. Fuel mix, prop pitch, radiator (axis, wohoo). There's even a supercharger toggle. But no flaps bindable to an axis. None of these things seem to have any use what so ever as the game is extremely(!) fast paced, with extreme amounts of highly varied action taking place within a few square kilometers. Maybe in some custom made more realistic missions if that's possible. There's none of that in the campaigns.

- The engine behaves strangely. It has 'normal' operating range, and then when you reach 75% or more throttle, it snaps instantly into super high RPM with extreme loudness and shaking of the airplane (very cool effect when giving it max throttle chasing bombers or otherwise, gunsights shaking). Something is clearly messed up here.

- The engines itself has a high quality nice sound effect, but as I haven't flown or heard high quality recordings of these engines except from a Bf 109 I am unable to verify how authentic they sound. Sound effects vary in quality overall. The machineguns sound absurd (like a single MG firing when there should be 4 etc), while cannons sound similar to any of the various amount of cannon sounds floating around IL-2 and it's mods.

- Sound effects are 'balanced' so you can hear everything well in the environment, a bit like Call of Duty series. You easily hear enemy engines, their guns and so on as if you were hanging under a basic glider with no cockpits, headphones or anything. As far as I know, this is not how things sound like in real life. Your own engine is extremely loud in real life, and you have vibrations and also a sealed cockpit around you.

- I don't think I noticed sound traveling at the speed of sounds (i.e. watch something happen, hear it delayed after); and I don't recall noticing doppler effect from moving sources. More like instantaneous sound travel. I may be wrong on this.

- Physics: I could not provoke snap-rolls in either the spitfire or the LA-7 (max elevator back, then max rudder to either side). I did manage to provoke spins, but only after trying the snap roll maneuver going nose up for a while until airspeed dropped enough. It doesn't seem to let you pull hard enough on the elevators to get into turbolent buffeting/near stall or stall. Instead the the plane keeps turning and turning, always pulling enough G's to black out the pilot. None of that 'low slow and flapping around helplessly in front of someone's guns'.

- Spins: When spins occured, they could sometimes be prevented from escalating by instant stick forward and opposite rudder (also reducing throttle), but also often they would become impossible or near impossible to recover from. The spitfire would keep spinning like crazy (not a flatspin, a moderate or low nose spin) even when I early in the spin had performed all the correct spin recovery methods (see above). IL-2 behaves very differently in this respect - enters spins and stalls much more easily, but also sorts itself out if you take proper action fast enough. Not having read or flown these planes in reality I cannot say if spin recovery is more realistic in either game/sim, but I believe IL-2 is probably closer.

- Torque effects are very powerful and noticable when in the air, though not as hardcore on the ground (rudder is necessary for take off nonetheless). At least the torque effect of the plane wanting to roll left or right depending on how much the prop is being forced to spin. It is definitely much more of that than IL-2 (spitfire comparison). Again, I don't know which is more real, but the Spitfire was very tedius to try to fly except at the power setting where it didn't want to roll left or right all the time. There is proper trimming just like IL-2 and they work exactly the same.

- I was tasked with preventing Ju 87 Stukas from dive bombing ships on the beach (basically) in Dover. I had large amounts of my wings missing from being shot up by He-111's earlier in the mission, and even at my low speed and the low speed of the Stuka, it started doing constant loops, and I'd follow, with no problems what so ever with stalling out or otherwise. Going from 15m above the water to maybe 100-150, around and around. From having flown the Stuka myself in other sims as well as general knowledge, I do not think there's any chance in hell it could possibly do loops at low speed in tight turning radiuses. The engine is far too weak for those kind of stunts. The spitfire was damaged to hell and yet it did it without any effort or drama. I was just pulling the stuck back and following, shooting whenever I got it in my sights (hard to hit, harder than IL-2, due to earlier stated reasons).

Summary:

And there you have it. Wings of Prey is like GRID: Race Driver meets Call of Duty 5: World at War, but in the air, with an option for semi-realistic physics. It's mindblowingly gorgeous, awesome graphics engine, decent sounds, intensely atmospheric. But it is shallow, lacking depth, authenticity and leaves out that which is not direct combat (well, there is an option for taking off before a mission...). Overly dramatized. Think about the flight scenes from the movie "Pearl Harbor" or "The Red Baron" from a few years ago. Bending the laws of physics, historical inaccuracies, unreal and over the top but impressive effects. For anyone who wants to understand and experience these machines and air combat for what it was, this is rubbish. For those who don't have those kind of interests foremost and can suspend their disbelief easily (perhaps due to the amazing graphics), and just care & want to have action all the time, this is the ticket. Can't think of any better arcade flying game that handles WW2 fighter planes. This game won't teach you anything except how chaotic and emotional something like the Battle of Berlin might truly have looked like - something IL-2 and any other flight sim has been completely unable to convey. I tired of it after a couple of hours, I miss the flight sims too much.

[zakkandrachoff]

"""GRID: Race Driver is like Wings of prey"""

Grid is the best car simulator that is in the market. the correct is said Grid is like Storm Of war

[MikkOwl]

Originally Posted by zakkandrachoff

"""GRID: Race Driver is like Wings of prey"""

Grid is the best car simulator that is in the market. the correct is said Grid is like Storm Of war

Not to deviate too far from the topic, it requires some clarification on what it means to be compared to GRID:

GRID is a thorough to the bone arcade racing game (I hold some considerable authority on this topic, as racing/driving sims and real cars has been a significant interest for me since 2001). It's physics have nothing to do with the real world at all, except some basic concept of that wheel turns and pedals go slower or faster. However, it has a nice polished presentation and most of the effort has gone into the audio/visual aspect of the game as well as making it accessible to anyone no matter how ignorant or unskilled they may be of the topic. Wings of Prey shares the basic game approach/design outline closely with GRID.

IL-2 1946's most similar games in the racing side of things may be "iRacing", "Live for Speed" or "Race 07" with it's several expansions.

On a different note, I watched a youtube video after I wrote my impressions of someone flying the Me-262A1 aganist two P-51 Mustangs. Incredible landscape and graphical effects. The temporary switch in FOV to more zoomed in and back is expertly made, smooth panning. However, watching the 262 go around the way he was flying it (turn and burn style more or less) it was running in circles around the Mustangs in their little dogfight, and shot them both down. It's performance looked pretty much like that of a 1970's era jet, like the F-16 Falcon or F-15 Eagle. Not even close to stall, go vertical, down, hard turns, no problem. The 262 is indeed supposed to be awesome but not as a dogifighter.

[GF_Mastiff]

MMM I can't get on there web site it wont registar me..

I need to go to there forums and find out why my setting don't save they change every single time I restart the game!!! This is very bad!!!

[Desode]

@Mikkowl, Turn your sensitivity all the way up in the wop settings. It completety effects the FM of the aircraft. You can adjust it to where there are no spins and stalls or you can crank it and the planes will act completly different. It makes a huge difference, in the FM's.
DESODE

[kimosabi]

Originally Posted by MikkOwl

I got IL-2 in 2002 but didn't fly it much due to various reasons, then bought 1946 last year. Now I have a TrackIR 5, Logitech G940 (a week old), Saitek Quadrant, decent monitor etc.

Good man, liking the G940? Love mine, need a bigger monitor though, even a 24" "shrinks" over time.

The rest of your post was outstanding.

~S~

[zakkandrachoff]

Originally Posted by GF_Mastiff

MMM I can't get on there web site it wont registar me..

I need to go to there forums and find out why my setting don't save they change every single time I restart the game!!! This is very bad!!!

Yes , I have the same problem. I download the Demo of Wings of prey and the settings is dont save when i restart the sim , i need config the damn jostick all the time ... this is bull's##t, and in the Berlin Map the russian plane have all the time the Bombs, How I can put Limited weapon? this is like very very arcade if i cant do that oprion. i can't combat in that way

And in some places i read that Stom of War dont will have best graphics that Wings Of Prey...