Wings of Fury

The Good
Do you remember that classic title called Sopwith? It was a very simple game but with great gameplay. Well, The Wings of Fury is a lot like Sopwith. You are the pilot of an American F6F Hellcat plane during WW II and your goal is to defeat the Japanese by destroying all enemy structures on a series of islands. Also you'll have to sink enemy ships.

The game is a lot of fun to play (at least the first hours, see below). You take off from an aircraft carrier and you use four types of weapons to battle the enemy. The game is an action game with some minor simulation aspects. I enjoyed taking out enemy fighter planes and flying low to mow down enemy troops with my machine guns. And when I had taken a lot of damage I used to crash my plane into enemy bunkers. The plane is very easy to control and responds well to your commands, I had no difficulty whatsoever with taking off or landing on my carrier for a refuel and a reload (see below if you have problems with this). Moreover the PC version of this game has a save game option, which allows you to save your campaign whenever you are on your aircraft carrier.

The Bad

• Gameplay is very repetitive. Level design has somewhat the following formula: Level 6 = Level 5 + an extra island or ship. At a certain point in the game you are familiar with all the different types of enemies. The scenery doesn't change either.
• The game has no decent ending. When you' ve reached the Captain level you just keep getting new missions. Personally I hate this, I expect to be rewarded for finishing a game.
• Audio is rather minimal.
• No two-player mode available. I know it is an old game so you can't expect multiplayer options, but a two-player (splitscreen) mode would have been great.

**The Bottom Line**
The Wings of Fury is a game that is great fun for an hour or two. That is until the repetitiveness of this game and it's lack of a story line start to annoy you. BTW running this game on a modern PC is not easy. Taking off from your carrier is impossible if your processor speed is too high. To solve this problem I used Moslo and disabled the cache memory of my PC (edit BIOS). Be sure to make a boot-disk because starting Windows without your cache memory will take ages, and the game runs in DOS only so who needs Windows anyway.

The Good
The game is well ported from the Amiga/C64. The look of the game is the same. For the gameboy version the developer changed the (hard) controls, so that it is easier to handle the little plane. The enemy planes are easier to hunt down.

The Bad
The sound is like the original very poor. You hear just your motors and some bombs exploding. There are less things on the islands. In the original there were airfields from enemy planes on the islands or enemy torpedo bombers.

There´s no blood! The original game was on the black list in germany because when you bombed a house, the people came out and you had to shoot them with your guns or to bomb them into pieces. They screamed very cute when they were hit.

Thats all gone in the "clean" gameboy version. Thats a shame.

The Bottom Line
A relative good conversion of the original, but it is converted for the gameboy and so it is very "clean", that means, the funny things are mostly gone.