1916 Dogfight

Perhaps it’s a matter of opinion, and some people find clichés in their entertainment to be comforting, but personally I find that off-the-shelf ideas feel cheap and momentum-sapping.

Unfortunately, 1916 Dogfight begins with a horrible flight sim cliché that takes a huge amount of willpower to push past. Fortunately, the game does eventually blossom into an intriguing flight sim.

It’s World War I, the dawn of aerial combat. Games about the world wars have been done to death, but the monumental challenges that fighter pilots faced in 1916 are enough to make for some excellent aerial action, even if none of those pioneering pilots really had to fly their kites through rings to prove they were combat ready.

This is the opening cliché of 1916 Dogfight, and it’s almost a deal breaker. It’s one of those badly planned levels that supposedly teaches you how to fly, but it doesn’t take the Red Baron to figure out that ‘4’ and ‘6’ move you left and right, and ‘2’ and ‘8’ handle up and down.

Miss a ring, and you spend the rest of the narrow time limit circling it, and with no way to roll you can't turn sharply enough to get back through the ring without flying two miles in the opposite direction and trying again.

Neither is it particularly forgiving: even though you might swear you went through the middle, chances are the game will disagree.

Anyway, should you get through this laborious task, the game slowly opens up. Needless to say such precision flying isn’t required when actually dogfighting or bombing - the developer apparently just wanted to make sure you were good and aggravated from the outset.

Your planes aren’t well armed, but that’s quite in keeping with the job these pilots had to face. Dropping a bomb involved lumping it over the side of the cockpit, and while you can find yourself easily disorientated, all this is quite endurable given that it’s a WWI game.

What’s really impressive is the multiplayer facility. Indeed, everything else seems to be a cursory add-on to pad the game out around its Bluetooth-connected core. Up to six players can take to the sky together, and you can even draft in CPU controlled bots either as enemies, or as (reasonably intelligent) comrades.

Certainly the planes look their part, in smoothly rendered 3D, even if the environments are rather sparse. Fighting isn’t easy, by any stretch, and a bit more consideration to the flight mechanics would alleviate much of the game’s frustration when trying to hit those damn rings or position yourself behind a clairvoyant opponent.

If you’ve got the Bluetooth buddies to fly with, though, there’s no competition for 1916 Dogfight.