Birds of Steel is a fairly rare thing. It’s a serious vintage combat flight sim on consoles. It eschews much of the hyperbole of modern combat flyers, avoids the over-the-top action of arcade flyers and pitches itself firmly at the sort of console gamer that avidly watches the History Channel. It’s not a wide market, for sure.

[drop]There has been a lot of work on some areas of the game, with plenty of historical accuracy in both the montage videos, narrated by Stephen Fry, and the plane models and selection. Unfortunately, the voice acting throughout the game isn’t up to scratch and the campaign mode’s pacing nosedives too often into repetitive missions in which the core gameplay just isn’t compelling enough.

There are over 100 planes in the game and each one seems to have been something of a labour of love for its creator, modelled with quite impressive precision. Unfortunately, they spend most of their time in the game as specks just above the horizon so the impact of the decidedly less impressive ground textures is, unfortunately, perhaps more striking. It’s a real shame that there isn’t more focus on the variety and detail of the roster here, some of the planes accurately modelled are little more than curios in the world of vintage flight buffs, with no pressing need to be in the game at all so their inclusion is obviously down to the fact that the developers at Gaijin love the subject matter.

Make no mistake, this is a game made for fans of vintage combat flight. The normal difficulty setting makes it suitably nervy and fiddly to even get your bird in the air. On the hardest setting, it’s a constant battle just to keep your aeroplane operating within its safe limits. This is the sort of thing that would be better suited to the semi-serious PC flight sim crowd so its appearance on consoles is surprising. The easy difficulty makes things a little less simulation and a little more “point and shoot” and there are concessions made in the way you target enemies but the dogfighting remains a troublesome spot of turbulence in the game’s final approach.

[drop2]The two campaigns, one for the US and one for Japan, are set in the Pacific theatre of combat and won’t take too long to work through. There is a list of single missions you can take part in and a dynamic campaign in which you win victories in the air that secure territory on the ground, so there’s a bit more to it than simply the campaigns. On top of that there’s a (rather sparsely populated, unfortunately) multiplayer mode which allows for up to 16 competitive players or four co-op players to take to the skies. Fill it with a regular group of friends and there’s some serious potential for lasting fun online.

A fairly robust mission editor allows you to define quite specific parameters such as whether you’re flying over hostile territory (which shoots up at you), types of mission and even fuel load. There seems to be plenty of scope for extremely varied missions that should give this game an impressive lifetime, even outside of the multiplayer.

Pros:

• Cockpits are very impressive, although missing for some bombers.
• Serious vintage combat flight sim with real love poured into it.
• There’s plenty of single player content to be getting on with.
• The mission editor looks likely to yield great results, over time.

Cons:

• Ground scenery gets a little rough around the edges at times.
• Campaign mode pacing is hampered with repetition.
• Voice acting makes radio chatter cringeworthy.

Birds of Steel is not a game that will set the world alight. It won’t tear up the charts or challenge FIFA or Call of Duty for hearts and minds. But the focus isn’t on being the kind of game that everyone will love, it’s on being a good fit for a smaller, knowledgeable fan base. It’s tricky to see how large a market there is for a game like this but if, by some chance, you’re a fan of vintage air combat from the WWII era then this is likely to have great appeal.

Score: 7/10