Air Conflicts: Secret Wars is a mixed bag of things, but mostly an arcade sim with a decent (though hyperbolic) story wrapped around it. You play a female protagonist named DeeDee who, being a pilot smuggler gets caught up into World War II. And she serves with a man who personally flew and fought with her father in World War One. As the missions progress, the story unfolds through static cut scenes that have a pleasant cell shaded hand drawn look. Missions vary from stealthy strike missions to all out balls to the wall multi-plane dogfights. If you’re looking to play an IL-2 Sturmovik imitation, look elsewhere; this is strictly for the arcade fans. Difficulty can be toggled, but some missions are more difficult than they have any right to be. One particular mission toward the end involved destroying fleeing vehicles through the city of Berlin. Tall buildings made it difficult to get decent bombing runs or rocket attacks, and it took me over 50 tries to get it. (But at this point, being so close to the end I had to finish it!)

Graphics are okay, serving the purpose. They look console-ish, and the voice acting is pretty much done by three people. One guy doing four different men’s voices with different accents is cheesy to the point of being hilarious. The music score, on the other hand, is polished and grandiose. It’s on par with a Stephen Spielberg Hollywood feature. I even looked during the end credits to find out who the composer was. Sadly, he was not credited.
The game offers multiplayer, but servers were pretty scant. I did find one each time I logged on, and this is probably a testament to the game’s age. It was fun, but mostly consisted of aerial jousts with rockets being launched at each other. A lot of my kills were dumb luck.

I won’t be in a hurry to play the original Air Conflicts or Air Conflicts: Vietnam, but if you have a few bucks left in your Steam Wallet during a Summer or Winter Steam sale, you could do worse.

[b]Air Conflicts: Secret Wars[/b] is a mixed bag of things, but mostly an arcade sim with a decent (though hyperbolic) story wrapped around it. You play a female protagonist named DeeDee who, being a pilot smuggler gets caught up into World War II. And she serves with a man who personally flew and fought with her father in World War One. As the missions progress, the story unfolds through static cut scenes that have a pleasant cell shaded hand drawn look. Missions vary from stealthy strike missions to all out balls to the wall multi-plane dogfights. If you’re looking to play an IL-2 Sturmovik imitation, look elsewhere; this is strictly for the arcade fans. Difficulty can be toggled, but some missions are more difficult than they have any right to be. One particular mission toward the end involved destroying fleeing vehicles through the city of Berlin. Tall buildings made it difficult to get decent bombing runs or rocket attacks, and it took me over 50 tries to get it. (But at this point, being so close to the end I had to finish it!) Graphics are okay, serving the purpose. They look console-ish, and the voice acting is pretty much done by three people. One guy doing four different men’s voices with different accents is cheesy to the point of being hilarious. The music score, on the other hand, is polished and grandiose. It’s on par with a Stephen Spielberg Hollywood feature. I even looked during the end credits to find out who the composer was. Sadly, he was not credited. The game offers multiplayer, but servers were pretty scant. I did find one each time I logged on, and this is probably a testament to the game’s age. It was fun, but mostly consisted of aerial jousts with rockets being launched at each other. A lot of my kills were dumb luck. I won’t be in a hurry to play the original [b]Air Conflicts[/b] or [b]Air Conflicts: Vietnam[/b], but if you have a few bucks left in your Steam Wallet during a Summer or Winter Steam sale, you could do worse.