Red Wings: Aces of the Sky is a new arcade dogfighting game from developer All in! Games. It’s set during World War 1 and follows Manfred von Richthofen, otherwise known as the Red Baron who won over 80 battles during the time period. If you are in the mood for a new aerial combat game should this one be on your consideration list?
The campaign mode in Red Wings lets you play on two sides of the conflict across a total of around 50 missions. The Triple Alliance side represents Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary while the Triple Entente side represents France, Russia, and Great Britain. I thought it was pretty cool that you were able to experience both sides during the story. Story is told through cartoon-styled photo panels after every few missions or so that you play. It talks a lot about the Red Baron along with some other characters but I didn’t find it all that interesting honestly and the average voice-acting didn’t help matters. I found the actual aerial combat to be much more interesting.
In the game you can take control of over ten different historical aircraft to carry out your missions. If you have a local friend you can even team up in split-screen but I played through it solo. The controls on the Dualshock 4 felt pretty good with the left stick controlling your plane and the right stick being used to adjust your speed. Firing is handled with the trigger while certain skills are mapped to the core face buttons. These skills are basically aerial moves that you would perform with the standard controls in most other aerial combat games. Things like barrel rolls and quick turns are included here and they also have a cooldown meter attached to them. That means you need to keep your eye on the screen when in dogfights to know when you can quickly pull off a quick turn or similar move and gain the advantage on your foe.
Missions in the game won’t have you doing a lot of different things sadly. Most of the time it is a straight up destroy the enemies or protect your balloons type mission but sometimes you do get to do something else. Bombing missions shift the perspective to a top-down look and have you dropping bombs while dodging enemy fire while time trials have you trying to fly through checkpoints before your time runs out. That’s about it though and across the 50 missions it can start to feel a bit repetitive. Completing missions rewards you with between one to three stars depending on how well you did and you can use these stars to buy upgrades. Some are better than others but if you ever find yourself regretting spending your stars on something you can refund them and use them on something else.
When you finish the campaign there is a survival mode that you can jump into but there is nothing special about it that we haven’t seen in other games. You’ll pretty much just be battling waves of enemies to see how long you can last. The game looks good though and uses a cel-shaded look instead of a realistic one. The music and sound effects I enjoyed too but as I said before the voice-acting is just kind of average.
Red Wings: Aces of the Sky is a solid arcade aerial combat game with a great cel-shaded art style. It can be fun to play solo or with a friend locally but may be better suited to shorter sessions or else you run the risk of the repetitive missions making you grow bored of it. We don’t get a lot of games like this and much less ones that are simulators so if you are looking for that type of game give Red Wings a shot.
*Red Wings: Aces of the Sky is available now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Reviewed on PS4 Pro. Review copy provided by the publisher for this review.
Red Wings: Aces of the Sky
$19.99
Pros
- Flying and shooting with the crafts feels great
- Really cool looking stylized art style
- Music and sound effects were satisfying
- Can team up with a friend locally
Cons
- Story wasn't that interesting and voice acting was average
- Not a lot of variety in mission types
- Not much to do outside of the campaign
