Heroes over Europe

I've been looking for a modern WWII style arcade flight sim for a long time. It is quite surprising how thin they are on the ground with so much interest in using WWI and WWII over the years for games.

Finally we might have a real contender in Heroes over Europe.

Recently Tom Clancy's HAWX showed how an arcade flight sim could be made properly and that was great fun, but set in the modern world. From what I've read Heroes over Europe is using the same, or similar, game engine.

HoE is set in WWII, starting off with you flying a Hurricane, and as you progress you earn different fighters to fly, aiming eventually to get the famous Spitfire.

The graphics looks really nice, especially if you have a GFX card that can handle AA set to 4x, but even with AA switched off it still looks good.

I've been playing the game using an Xbox 360 controller and the game works very nicely with the dual sticks and triggers. Left stick to control plane movement, right stick forward/back controlling the throttle and left/right controlling the roll, and the right trigger controlling the guns.

The only annoying thing is that the game doesn't quite adapt properly to the 360 controller. It allows full control using it to navigate menus and control the game, but all on screen control pointers are still shown for the keyboard, so you have to randomly try to work out which button it is mapped to on the controller. But other than that I've not has any issues.

Controlling the planes is really easy with the 360 controller and you don't get disoriented in dog fights as you often do in other flight sims. This makes it great fun shooting down German planes and doing strafing runs at vehicles.

So far missions have begun and held together by comms from your computer controlled wing leader, giving instructions on where to go and what to do. This works well and is backed up by coloured arrow markers around the landscape and marking enemy planes, so you always know where you need to be heading, or where your targets are.

So far I give the game 8/10. Great graphics, polished gameplay that is very easy to pickup and play. And some great arcade dog fighting action.

Reviews say that the IL Sturmovik (or what is it called), is still the better one, at least better than Heroes over Europe.

Didn't know that you had a 360 controller :)

The IL-2 Sturmovik series is definitely much better, and a series I really like. But it is more a real Flight Sim than Heroes over Europe is. The graphics are quite amazing and contain a lot of detail and realistic feeling physics, and does make HoE's look quite basic my comparison. The latest game in the series, IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey was released in September, but I've yet to play this latest one. It's out on PS3 and 360 as well as PSP, but to the upset of many fans of the series it hasn't been released on the PC yet. I really hope it is as the PC lends itself much better to Flight Sims than consoles can. And a PS3 demo is available on PSN, and I think their is a 360 demo too. I'm going to try the PSP version as it could be a fun game on the little system.

But with HoE it is a pure arcade action shooter with you just being able to fly around shooting the enemy without needing to worry about the intricacies of flying. It's good fun.

The only thing that might frustrate players and make them put HoE down early is some of the requirements during missions. You have to do some exact objectives, and if you get them wrong its mission failure and start again. It doesn't happen often, but when it does it can be frustrating having to play though the whole mission again, knowing you might still not achieve the same objective. Thinks like shooting a plane down in a specific way.

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Didn't know that you had a 360 controller :)

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Yeah, when I built my new PC earlier this year and upgraded to Vista I bought a 360 controller as most PC games released in the last couple of years directly support it. Pretty decent gamepad.

I read the reviews about the 2 flight sims some time ago, HoE seems to be more the arcade flight shooter, but it also looks nice. Didn't try the demos yet, as I'm not really into the flight sims, I wish there would be a nice space flight sim on time again, and I mean also for consoles, I like them so much.

That is true. We haven't had a good proper Space Arcade Flight Sim in a very long time. Something as good as X-Wing/Tie Fighter or Wing Commander.

A game ive always ment to track down is secret weapons over normandy, ww2 flight sim type thing. Im sure it was a pc release and also on the origional xbox, hmmm i must look into it.

Oh, yeah, Secret Weapons over Normandy was quite a cool arcade flight sim set in WWII. Very similar in a way to Heroes over Europe, but a bit more serious in presentation. It was released on PC, Xbox and PS2 in 2003 so will run on fairly low end PCs these days. Good for laptops. I played the PS2 version back then.

I've been wanting a really good WW1 or WW2 flight sim for many years, one that can bring back the same atmosphere and nostalgia that Wings had and also be fun to play. But everything I've tried has been ultimately disappointing, either too arcadey and unrealistic (Blazing Angels) or too sim-like and plain boring.

Might try this soon though, sounds interesting. May also look at the Sturmovik games, the first one (or the 2006 one anyway) was released on GOG a while back.

HoE demo is available on both PS3 and Xbox 360, so you can at least try that one out for free. The latest IL-2 Sturmovik looks amazing on PS3 from the videos I've seen, and looks like it could be great fun.