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A solid arcade experience bogged down by repetitive missions and lack of difficulty.

I'm a pretty big fan of flight combat games, at least the more arcade style affairs like Crimson Skies. So I was going into Heroes Over Europe with a bit of optimism, and while the game wasn't exactly what I was hoping for, I found myself enjoying it for the short amount of time it lasted. It's not without issues, sure, but as far as simple, arcade style dog-fighting games go, its kind of fun.

The game puts you into the shoes of a few different pilots spread out across four campaigns during World War 2. There's a number of cutscenes and real footage of events scattered across the campaign to give you an idea of what's going on within that particular time period, and while I didn't care much for the voice acting of the game or the original dialogue, I thought the overall presentation of the menu design and the use of the old news footage was well done and sets a pretty solid tone for the game. Unfortunately, the awful voice acting has to carry over to the game while you're playing as well, and you'll get a lot of inane chatter from other pilots as you play that's not just relegated to telling you your objectives, so I didn't care much for that.

Like I mentioned earlier, this is an arcade experience for dog-fighting, you don't have to worry about ammo, outside of your secondary bombs, so you can freely fire away at anything and everything. Also, the game doesn't employ super realistic physics to your flight; I never had an issue with stalling out, even while I was pressing all the way back on the throttle to slow myself down. Hell, you can even bounce off of objects without completely destroying your aircraft; I had a few mid-air collisions and suffered little in the way of a health penalty. I don't mind this to be honest, and while I fully expect to crash and erupt into a fireball when I hit the ground, I like that I can glance off of another plane and not be destroyed, especially in some of the more hectic firefights within the game.

Really, the only thing I didn't like about Heroes Over Europe was the repetition of the objectives. Each mission has a primary and secondary objective, and the primary will change around a bit over time as new fighters enter the fray and other scenarios change. However, there are only about two objective types, one of which is wiping out opposing fighter planes or bombers, and the other is to protect an object that's either under attack or under some other type of threat. For the protect objectives, you'll get a lifebar in the upper right corner of the screen for the place or object you're trying to protect, and you'll typically have to fend off a set number of enemies, or hold them off for a certain amount of time, before you successfully complete it. For the straight up attacking objectives, you just take down wave after wave of enemy aircraft or ground patrols. The dog-fighting in the game is fun, sure, but it will grow stale after you play through a few of the missions and realize that the enemy AI isn't solid enough to make this a challenging affair. There were plenty of instances where I'd get behind a group of fighters and easily pick them off, and they wouldn't react a bit to the fact that their wingmen were being destroyed next to them, and instead they'd stay on their course without trying to move, dodge, or come around and return a shot or two. The game doesn't put much emphasis on defense for either side to be honest; it seems to be heavily focused on the offense aspect more than anything.

The online modes of Heroes Over Europe aren't particularly groundbreaking, but they're well suited for the game and they're pretty much what you'd want in a dog-fighting game. There's your typical deathmatch and team deathmatch type modes, and then there's the Survival and Team Survival modes. Survival is basically a no-respawn deathmatch mode, with the winner (or winning team) being the last one standing. It's a little more interesting than the standard deathmatch stuff, so it was worth checking out. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a great deal of online support from fans at the moment, so I had a hard time finding games on occasion, and I was never able to get into a full 16 player game while reviewing it. The games I did play were lag free though, so at least they're technically sound.

All together, I enjoyed Heroes Over Europe, but I'm not sure I'd suggest buying it right away. It's a fun arcade experience, and really easy to pick up and play, but the fact that the mundane objectives will start to bore you after a couple hours makes this one hard to suggest. If you really enjoy these types of games you're bound to get some fun out of it, but for the more casual fan of the genre you'd be better off with a rental. I'd still say it's worth checking out at some point, but it's not what I'd call a must buy.