Tedious, frustrating dogfights combined with repetitive mission design grounds Red Wings: Aces of the Sky before it can get off the runway.
Red Wing: Aces of the Sky manages to suck the excitement out of piloting World War 1-era warplanes in aerial dogfights. When it’s not lulling players to sleep with its bland, repetitive missions, it drives them away with tedious, frustrating combat. Whether you enlist alone or with a co-pilot, players would do well to keep their feet on the ground.
The arcade-style dogfighting shows promise of a good foundation. Mowing down enemy aircraft may be simple but sometimes has a mindless fun to it. Special maneuvers such as evasive barrel rolls and quick turnarounds add a decent layer of thoughtfulness to firefights. A cinematic finishing blow instantly kills foes on their last legs; a neat idea on paper, except it requires such low enemy health it’s often quicker to just shoot them down the old fashioned way. The appealing cel-shaded art gives the game a colorful, lighthearted atmosphere (despite the uninteresting environments). In a small but cool touch, vision-obscuring sandstorms occasionally mix up the action. It’d be great if Red Wings featured more weather events such as these, as players patrol the same handful of clear skyboxes, for the most part.
Two identical, 25-mission campaigns stall out in fun after the first 10 or so battles. The same batch of mission types repeat ad nauseum: blow up planes, destroy/defend zeppelins, bomb ground targets, and race through rings. None of them offer much depth or excitement. Standard dogfights, the most entertaining missions by default, quickly lose their luster since gameplay hardly evolves beyond holding down the same fire button for hours on end.
The introduction of armored enemies adds a frustrating tedium to combat. It feels like shooting a fleet of bullet sponges since players must drain their shields before taking them down. Players can’t even sustain fire on them for long since guns overheat relatively quickly, allowing their shields to constantly regenerate. It makes conquering these sturdier foes feel more like a chore than an epic battle. As armored foes appear in greater numbers, the already lengthy battles, which often pit players against 30+ planes, take even longer to slog through.
Destroying blimps and bombing ground facilities feel more dull than bad. On the other hand, racing through refueling rings before gas runs out easily stands as the most infuriating mission type. Besides taking ages to finish, fuel depletes so quickly that missing a single ring usually results in failure. Things get worse when players must also contend with anti-air fire, which can happen either in the direct path of rings or even inside them. The penalty for failure: restarting the entire stage from scratch. Since courses quickly expand to 50+ rings, these missions become hair-ripping affairs and ultimately feel like bad form of padding.
Improving abilities via a skill tree alleviates some of Red Wings' annoyances–to a degree. Players can unlock increased overheating resistance and shorter cooldown times for abilities, for example. Unfortunately, earning the necessary skill points in a timely manner requires finishing stages with top grades. Thus, players may have to replay the same boring stages to achieve better scores and get the points needed for a much-needed enhancement. Red Wings’ missions only get tougher, and therefore longer, as they go, so players will need all the help they can get. Is it better to spend time grinding bland missions repeatedly or to just plow through harder versions of them as they come? Neither choice becomes very appealing.
A boring story, narrated in a manner similar to a snore-inducing school history class video, manages to further deflate an already flat campaign. Battling waves of enemies in the Survival mode is as unappealing as it sounds given it features the same one-note combat. Red Wings: Aces of the Sky clearly tries to take off with a solid framework of ideas, but the gas peters out quick, crashing it upon takeoff.
Red Wings: Aces of the Sky is available on NIntendo Switch. Screen Rant was provided a digital Switch code for the purpose of this review.
