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

[Lucas_From_Hell]

But it is limited. You only need to drop 32 bombs with your La-7, then you run out of them.

If you ask me, first picture looks way better - actually, not better, but realistic. And that's only an old DX8 render without any fancy filters or whatsoever... Oh boy, I can't even imagine how it will look final!

[Desode]

Originally Posted by zakkandrachoff

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...

I don't know about the demo but in the full version you can set it to limited ammo and fuel before each mission , both Mp and Sp, Then you only have 2 bombs and the ammo the planes had in real life.

[MikkOwl]

@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

Thanks for the tip. I believe that the default of the sensitivity was maxed out every time I looked through that screen. The planes seemed to respond somewhat similar to IL-2 (from how much you yank the stick around), so what I reported was more of the differences in flight model rather than setup of the controls.

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.

I have a 24" also (16:10) but compared to you I'm satisfied with it (TrackIR5 made the window into the world seem a lot 'larger' if you know what I mean). I do sit pretty damned close to it though, might have something to do with it (maybe 50-60cm?).

I own a CH Combat Stick (F16 clone from my 1996 onwards days) with a CH Throttle but they didn't work anymore due to pots and gameport connector. I flew tons of sims in my earliest days until late 90's, and after trying IL-2 I stopped flying apart from stints in OP Flashpoint and Armed Assault (how sad). This is mostly due to how hardcore IL-2 was and I did not have rudders, nor did I appreciate how important rudders would be. Was more noob than I realized This fall I gave WW2 online a go (again) and got myself a cheap Logitech "Extreme 3D Pro" and rigged my G25 pedals as rudders and the wheel itself like a (very realistic and EXTREMELY well functioning) elevator trim wheel, and the Saitek Quadrant as throttle, prop. pitch and flaps. Also got myself IL-2 1946 off of steam. Totally hooked again! So happy to have found my way back to my beloved flight sims. Ok ok, trying to stick to the topic of controllers Needed to explain where I am coming from, no Saitek and recent CH gear experience etc. Read tons of reviews and forums about them though. The G940 is a mixed bag. I now realize I have too much to say about it to fit it here, as it's not on-topic enough and I don't want to bother people who came here to read about Wings of Prey. I will say that the lack of Force Feedback as well as throttle lights support in Wings of Prey is a big letdown and a strong incentive for a G940 owner to fly something else.

Glad you enjoyed the post. I'm talkative and extremely analytical, love to evaluate and analyze everything. I did not bother structuring my post well though, could have been much shorter and easier to read. Time to go do a nice post for the G940, I'll post it in the G940 topic that already exists in this forum. I'll write it and post it before posting this post. Here we go: http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...2&postcount=17

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

If you ask me, first picture looks way better - actually, not better, but realistic. And that's only an old DX8 render without any fancy filters or whatsoever... Oh boy, I can't even imagine how it will look final!

It is not unthinkable that Wings of Prey will be more eyecatching and atmospheric graphically than Storm of War. I ran Wings of Prey in Dx9 mode and I'm just blown away by much of the graphics presented, though the artistic license taken in places does not belong to a hardcore sim experience.

The image comparison is interesting. I'm a hobby photographer since late 2002 and a freelancing illustrator (drawing/painting stuff on the computer for clients, mostly sci-fi stuff) so similar to Oleg Maddox I guess I have the background necessary to, uh, have an eye for detail? I am beginning to feel like I am presenting myself as some braggart narcissist. In the screenshot comparison:

Storm of War picture appears to be in full daylight, no clouds and no atmospheric effects, or if they exist, it's set to extremely long visibility (not talking about rendering distance in the engine, but how much humidity is in the air limiting how far one can see). The sun gives warm colors. The palette in the pic is not quite right, though Oleg has commented they know this and the work was not yet completed. The terrain is also a test, where they try different ways of doing things to see what works/looks/runs better, and the image itself is now half a years(?) old.

Wings of Prey picture: Looks like the demo mission. Lots of humid atmospheric effects. The general impression is that of a very overcast, humid English weather (that they really do get a lot there, if you are flying below the cloud cover). But no matter where you fly you still get that murky overcast effect even when the sun is not blocked by any clouds, blinding you and casting shadows and reflection on planes and the water. The colours look like one is looking through some green coloured sunglasses (which I used a few years ago). Most likely they took some artistic license (means to alter things from reality/authenticity to achieve a purpose) in order to convey typical English weather/environment. I think they successfully achieve this. But the unreal mix of bright sun and overcast murk coexisting at the same time, and the green coloured glasses makes it feel surreal, or unreal even. It looks like out of some movie production rather than reality. I would like to point out that the other map in the demo, battle of Berlin, seems to look much closer to reality while being hugely impressive in it's details and mood.

[Desode]

Originally Posted by MikkOwl

Thanks for the tip. I believe that the default of the sensitivity was maxed out every time I looked through that screen. The planes seemed to respond somewhat similar to IL-2 (from how much you yank the stick around), so what I reported was more of the differences in flight model rather than setup of the controls.


I have a 24" also (16:10) but compared to you I'm satisfied with it (TrackIR5 made the window into the world seem a lot 'larger' if you know what I mean). I do sit pretty damned close to it though, might have something to do with it (maybe 50-60cm?).

I own a CH Combat Stick (F16 clone from my 1996 onwards days) with a CH Throttle but they didn't work anymore due to pots and gameport connector. I flew tons of sims in my earliest days until late 90's, and after trying IL-2 I stopped flying apart from stints in OP Flashpoint and Armed Assault (how sad). This is mostly due to how hardcore IL-2 was and I did not have rudders, nor did I appreciate how important rudders would be. Was more noob than I realized This fall I gave WW2 online a go (again) and got myself a cheap Logitech "Extreme 3D Pro" and rigged my G25 pedals as rudders and the wheel itself like a (very realistic and EXTREMELY well functioning) elevator trim wheel, and the Saitek Quadrant as throttle, prop. pitch and flaps. Also got myself IL-2 1946 off of steam. Totally hooked again! So happy to have found my way back to my beloved flight sims. Ok ok, trying to stick to the topic of controllers Needed to explain where I am coming from, no Saitek and recent CH gear experience etc. Read tons of reviews and forums about them though. The G940 is a mixed bag. I now realize I have too much to say about it to fit it here, as it's not on-topic enough and I don't want to bother people who came here to read about Wings of Prey. I will say that the lack of Force Feedback as well as throttle lights support in Wings of Prey is a big letdown and a strong incentive for a G940 owner to fly something else.

Glad you enjoyed the post. I'm talkative and extremely analytical, love to evaluate and analyze everything. I did not bother structuring my post well though, could have been much shorter and easier to read. Time to go do a nice post for the G940, I'll post it in the G940 topic that already exists in this forum. I'll write it and post it before posting this post. Here we go: http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...2&postcount=17




It is not unthinkable that Wings of Prey will be more eyecatching and atmospheric graphically than Storm of War. I ran Wings of Prey in Dx9 mode and I'm just blown away by much of the graphics presented, though the artistic license taken in places does not belong to a hardcore sim experience.

The image comparison is interesting. I'm a hobby photographer since late 2002 and a freelancing illustrator (drawing/painting stuff on the computer for clients, mostly sci-fi stuff) so similar to Oleg Maddox I guess I have the background necessary to, uh, have an eye for detail? I am beginning to feel like I am presenting myself as some braggart narcissist. In the screenshot comparison:

Storm of War picture appears to be in full daylight, no clouds and no atmospheric effects, or if they exist, it's set to extremely long visibility (not talking about rendering distance in the engine, but how much humidity is in the air limiting how far one can see). The sun gives warm colors. The palette in the pic is not quite right, though Oleg has commented they know this and the work was not yet completed. The terrain is also a test, where they try different ways of doing things to see what works/looks/runs better, and the image itself is now half a years(?) old.

Wings of Prey picture: Looks like the demo mission. Lots of humid atmospheric effects. The general impression is that of a very overcast, humid English weather (that they really do get a lot there, if you are flying below the cloud cover). But no matter where you fly you still get that murky overcast effect even when the sun is not blocked by any clouds, blinding you and casting shadows and reflection on planes and the water. The colours look like one is looking through some green coloured sunglasses (which I used a few years ago). Most likely they took some artistic license (means to alter things from reality/authenticity to achieve a purpose) in order to convey typical English weather/environment. I think they successfully achieve this. But the unreal mix of bright sun and overcast murk coexisting at the same time, and the green coloured glasses makes it feel surreal, or unreal even. It looks like out of some movie production rather than reality. I would like to point out that the other map in the demo, battle of Berlin, seems to look much closer to reality while being hugely impressive in it's details and mood.

The only point I don't agree with is "unreal mix of bright sun ". I take it you don't fly in real life. The sun isn't bright enough in the game. If if was like real life you wouldn't want to play it or all we would hear is complaints from 90% of the games consumers.
I flew yesterday and with the snow on the ground and the glare off the snow every place, you almost couldn't see anything anywhere. Keep in mind to that these planes are single seaters and there is just glass over your head, so it is even worse then what I went through yesterday in my cessna skylane C-182L.
Desode

[MikkOwl]

Originally Posted by Desode

The only point I don't agree with is "unreal mix of bright sun ". I take it you don't fly in real life. The sun isn't bright enough in the game. If if was like real life you wouldn't want to play it or all we would hear is complaints from 90% of the games consumers.
I flew yesterday and with the snow on the ground and the glare off the snow every place, you almost couldn't see anything anywhere. Keep in mind to that these planes are single seaters and there is just glass over your head, so it is even worse then what I went through yesterday in my cessna skylane C-182L.
Desode

You misinterpreted; what I was saying was that in the game the palette and shading of the ground implies thick overcast, but at the same time it can be barely any clouds or mist cover at all and sun shining brightly - it cannot be both in reality. If it is somewhat clear weather and sunny, then one gets warm colors and sharp contrasts/shadows. If very overcast and misty murky, then things can look flat, soft, muted colors. But simultaneously?

The sun blinding effect in the game was pretty good btw, even looking in the general direction of the sun, the ground/sea was totally overexposed bright for several seconds before the virtual eyes adjusted and some details started coming through. I'm not sure IL-2 is strong enough however.

And no, not a pilot. Flew in a Cessna once in the late 80's as a kid, took a bunch of pictures, and then some airliners.

[Desode]

Originally Posted by MikkOwl

You misinterpreted; what I was saying was that in the game the palette and shading of the ground implies thick overcast, but at the same time it can be barely any clouds or mist cover at all and sun shining brightly - it cannot be both in reality. If it is somewhat clear weather and sunny, then one gets warm colors and sharp contrasts/shadows. If very overcast and misty murky, then things can look flat, soft, muted colors. But simultaneously?

The sun blinding effect in the game was pretty good btw, even looking in the general direction of the sun, the ground/sea was totally overexposed bright for several seconds before the virtual eyes adjusted and some details started coming through. I'm not sure IL-2 is strong enough however.

And no, not a pilot. Flew in a Cessna once in the late 80's as a kid, took a bunch of pictures, and then some airliners.

I got ya, thank heavens there are no sun spots. Imagine being in a vertical dogfight in WWII and climbing into the sun. You would be seeing sun spots like crazy ! Then on top of that your fighting for your life. It was no doubt a visual Hell for fighter pilots !

I have flown to New orleans for Mardi Gras a couple of times. The haze and humidity was visually interesting to fly in. Its like a Glaze in the air.

I must say though WOP and ROF give the two best feelings of actual flight out of any other sim, I have played. I can't put my finger on what exactly it is that does this for me, but I think its a combination of different things.
I'm really impressed with WOP's shadow system, Its very good in my opinion, maybe one of the best I have seen.

Here is some info on the Dagor game engine. This engine is doing somethings that have never been done in visual aspects, It may explain why the game looks different then any other flight sim. Check it out and read what all the engines abilitys are. I would say that in certain acpects the WOP Dev team is maybe pushing some of these effects to show off the new engine. I know I hope to see more sims made with Dagor, its a very smooth running engine.
http://www.gaijinent.com/projects/dagor.htm
Desode

[Desode]

Here is a couple of videos of real flights, one modern and one from WWII. I'm wondering what you guys think about how well they match to Wop.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIUpv...eature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0kmUwp1TKk

Now tell me which sims out there looks like this real footage the most ?
Wop or others ?

I'm just curious.

I'd say this footage is a example of what the Wop Dev's where watching & trying to match. The colors are just about a perfect match.
DESODE

[Skoshi Tiger]

I think you hit the point there that everyone is going on about. WOP is trying to simulate the look of 1940's gun and cini camera footage. If that was the intent of the developers they've hit the mark.

This is still not simulating the look of real life, no more than the modern re-coloured B/W WWII footage is life like.

Yes I have my private pilots licence, and even though it's been a while since I've got behind the controls of plane (about the time life caught up with me and I got kids!) the video's I've seen for WOP or even IL2 for that matter, do not match what I saw out the window of the pipers and cessna's I got my licence in.

But like anything, little step's forward and we will get there in the end. It will be a while till we get holo-decks to fly our flight sims in!

Cheers!

[MikkOwl]

I must say though WOP and ROF give the two best feelings of actual flight out of any other sim, I have played. I can't put my finger on what exactly it is that does this for me, but I think its a combination of different things. I'm really impressed with WOP's shadow system, Its very good in my opinion, maybe one of the best I have seen.

Flight sims are few and far between, so them having the latest goodies is a rare occurance. No doubt they set up the engine with a load of effects quite nicely for the most part. Since most of us never flew anything at home with graphics like this, it is no surprise we are so impressed. And let me see if the reasons you think it feels 'real' is the same as I do, especially compared to, for example, IL-2:

- Foremost, the graphical effects and details. The cockpit windows look more stained around the edges of the frames/pillars and there area more shaders at work. Long distance rendering with very well defined atmospheric effects, lots of planes visilbe at the same time, high rendering quality and decent speed doing it, shadows being cast by aircraft parts into the cockpit, higher quality textures of own plane when looking out from cockpit, neat reflective/bump mapping effects. In general, a lot of activity, the world is filled with things going on visibly and aurally.

- Specific immersive additions: The pilot being heard breathing in a strained way when pulling G's, the G-forces acting on the pilot's head being VERY well tweaked (even without headtracking - a real human head is dampened from G-forces and vibrations in a good way due to the neck and it's muscles, giving a bit of a delayed smoothed movement), all changes in field of view (FOV, zoom) take place smoothly without sudden jerky changes, the airframe and view really starts vibrating when going fast, as well as having high throttle setting (got this while trying to catch up with He-111 bombers, tried to shoot like that too, not easy).

- Perhaps the music for some. It's always there. I turned it off however.

Add it all together and for your eyes and ears, in many ways, it fools you better than the rest. At the same time, there are things which are not there correctly and these break the immersion (depending on the person). Each time I started that Battle of Berlin mission in the La-7, the first few seconds when it flows smoothly and I just look around (trackIR) it is a monumental sight, that things can look 'that good and convincing'.

Here is a couple of videos of real flights, one modern and one from WWII. which sims out there looks like this real footage the most ?
Wop or others ? I'd say this footage is a example of what the Wop Dev's where watching & trying to match. The colors are just about a perfect match.

The footage there is grainy or shot with a not so well set up camera, and neither are a good representation of how things look like in reality. For example, in the Stuka flight, the camera often adjusted its exposure to match the bright sky, and not the (far far darker) landscape, leading to the landscape looking much darker, even underexposed, compared to how it should be (on a side note, I was taken by how similar it looked to looking around with TrackIR, haha, headmounted cam or something). The WW2 era footage (which I have seen many times before ) is discolored and of poor quality.

Either way, I don't think any sim matches those clips much. The vibrations from engine and explosions certainly lend themselves more to Wings of Prey, while the colors of the stuka clip (pretty real, at least) are pretty similar to FSX (micorsoft combat simulator).

the video's I've seen for WOP or even IL2 for that matter, do not match what I saw out the window of the pipers and cessna's I got my licence in.

But like anything, little step's forward and we will get there in the end. It will be a while till we get holo-decks to fly our flight sims in!

How about microsoft Flight simulator + FSX?
Holo decks... I want. But then I'd move in there and not want to leave.

[nearmiss]

Originally Posted by 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.

Good posting, well done. I knew I wouldn't like it.