Birds of Steel Review

Birds of Steel attempts to bring a semi-serious WWII flight sim to the console market, featuring historically accurate missions from the Pacific battlegrounds on both the American and Japanese points of view, narrative from Stephen Fry and a fairly nice looking engine; the game seems to be rather spiffing.

From the outset it seems that there has been a large amount of work hours put into this title, though why your in game CO is English when you’re learning to fly out near Pearl Harbor is baffling. You’ll get to control a wide variety of aircraft throughout your campaign, kicking off in some tutorial missions before the events of Pearl Harbor, you get to grips with one of the American fighters.

You’ll be able to select what kind of flight model you desire before you kick off, ranging from simple arcade style to a more realistic approach. This will also impact on whether you want unlimited munitions and fuel or go for a more hardcore experience by limiting everything you possibly can.

While all the planes you encounter seem shiny and accurately modelled, the ground detail however can be rather barren and lacking in any form of visual clarity, looking like they’re from the mid 90’s style flight sims. This is a shame as it can be slightly off-putting being immersed in a massive dogfight with loads of aircraft in the skies only to catch a glimpse of the ugly ground beneath you.

The two part single player campaign shouldn’t take the average gamer too long to battle through, ranging from simple dogfighting missions to bomber raids and torpedo runs on battleships. There is enough variation to please most fans, however the simpler difficulties make this more of a trivial shooter rather than air combat sim so we would recommend using the difficulty above the base simple mode to give yourself more enjoyment from the title.

A nice touch we felt was after each mission you could view your replay of the entire level, where you’re able to switch views to other aircraft and have a cinematic experience of your combat exploits which would probably offer you more excitement than Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor movie.
You also have the chance to play single player missions along with a dynamic campaign where your victories impact the overall battle plan, giving you a little more bang for your buck. While there are cooperative and multiplayer modes within the game, we were unable to find any games during our playtime with this title, but on offer are options for up to 16 players competitively while your co-op offerings are for upto four players.

Once you’ve finished the campaign, had your fill of multiplayer and feel you still need some combat, then fire up the mission editor. This allows you to change a wide number of variables to create your perfect scenario. fly over enemy territory, get shot by flak and take out waves upon waves of enemy fighters, or even go on night time bombing runs over an unsuspecting village.
Whatever your mind can think of then you could probably do it in this rather expansive editor. So if you’re on the market for a WWII Pacific based flight sim then you can do a lot worse than Birds of Steel.