Warplanes: WW1 Sky Aces
Platform- Nintendo Switch,
Developer- Home Net Games
Publisher- 7Levels
Release Date- December 11, 2020
Number of Players- 1 Player
Genre- Action, Arcade
Play Modes- TV, Tabletop, Handheld
History fans will likely enjoy this at least a little bit just due to some of the historic aircraft and battles that are in the game. Honestly, I myself enjoy the topic and when I saw some of the planes that you can pilot in battle I was loving it. Definitely pretty accurate in that sense, seriously, who hasn’t wanted to pilot The Red Baron’s Fokker and tear up the skies in nearly all
of World War 1’s major fronts?
While you can pilot fighters and bombers alike in some of history’s most iconic air battles from the first world war, it still just barely manages to scratch the vintage aerial warfare itch. Although you are able to take command of over 30 of history’s earliest, and at times, strangest warplanes that brought in the dawn of a new era of war, it still leaves quite a bit to be desired since many of the levels become rather redundant giving the feeling that you’ve already been there and done that before.
While the game is fun to play for a short time, the clunky controls and less than competent AI do get a little frustrating at times. I mean, once you get used to it you can zip around pretty well, but it’s still not ideal. A big part of why I say that is because part of the clunkiness that I mentioned comes from what I can only describe as lack of response. Don’t get me wrong, it works, you just need to acclimate to it a little bit. It’s not like it’s not functional or drops out at odd times, and I wouldn’t call it input lag, the response just feels very slow and cumbersome
is all. It’s not like you push the button or control stick and nothing happens at all, it just happens slowly. I’m not going to say that it’s completely terrible, just that it feels like the physical controls were added somewhat hastily. I’m sure the responsiveness could likely be fixed with an update at
some point though. Warplanes: WW1 Sky Aces does have some pretty clean visuals in all honesty, at least when it comes to the planes which are all very well designed and replicated based on the old vintage planes that were used during the time. But, the aircraft are definitely the star of the show here. While the backgrounds do have a nice amount of detail, they do seem to sort of fall flat in comparison to the planes. The aircraft do look pretty good and are fairly accurate historically, but aside from that
the game does leave a slight bit more to be desired in terms of graphical polish.
While there is sure to be a market and audience for this type of game, it still falls a little short of
leaving the runway for a long range mission. Warplanes: WW1 Sky Aces definitely accomplishes it’s
task of setting to the skies, but doesn’t seem to take full advantage of what the Switch has to offer
or can do with this mobile port.