European Air War

The Good
this game is so great on so much: Graphics, gameplay, realism. The realism is one of the best things. If you're used to using the standard turn&burn-tactics(turn, turn, and turn HARD until you can lay your sights on the enemy), you will lose in this game. you have to use real-world tactics, if you want to succeed. If you get the latest patch, you could have up to 250 planes in the air at once!

The Bad
The missions in the career mode are to similar. If you are a german in the 1943-onwards career, you are going to spend most of your time picking on B-17's. There should be more variety in the missions.

The Bottom Line
If you have a remote interest in anything connected with planes and warbirds, get this game. It's the best EVER.

The Good
This game is probably my favourite World War II aircraft-based game. You have a lot of freedom, you may fly around 20 different aircraft; American aircraft, German aircraft and the RAF. The graphics (especially texture/ground graphics) are very advanced for 1998, and look great when you're up high, and yes, even when you're low you can see people (and shoot them of course!).

The ability to give orders to the other members of your squadron is also pretty effective. This game features real documentaries, and you can enjoy an 'instant action' flight, or make your own one up. Also, you can choose a campaign mode... Which brings me along to my gripes...

The Bad
... The campaign mode is more of a 'career' mode and is very linear. Unlike other games, you cannot control what actually happens in the war as a whole. You also have to fly fairly far each mission, which gets fairly boring.

The AI isn't great in version 1.0 of this game, but the 1.1 patch makes it TOO good, and none of my old tactics worked anymore, because they depended on the poor AI! Glad to see they fixed the problem, though.

My last rant: This game refuses to run on my new PC. It apparently needs Windows 98 or below - Nasty - It refuses to run on an NT-based operating system. I don't have a Win9x based machine anymore, which makes this game unplayable for me.

The Bottom Line
It is a solid World War 2 shooter. Maybe a tad dated, but looks about 2 years ahead of its time. The linear game play is avoidable as you can create your own missions.

I strongly recommend European Air War. You'll be hooked for hours, trust me. :)

The Good
I have played it over both a local network and the Internet. The local network (10/100) is excellent, but over the Internet it is unplayable at 56K (way too much lag).

The graphics are the best of any WWII aircraft simulation I've seen so far.

The variety of ground/ocean targets is really awesome (tanks, armored cars, different types of buildings, destroyers, etc.)

The variety of planes is pretty good, but it could be better. They did a great job of accurately modeling the physics of flight. Also, the enemy planes are smart. They'll juke and do whatever they can to shake you off. They aren't too good in the first version, but in subsequent revisions they got a lot better.

The Bad
As compared to the Lawrence Holland trilogy, specifically Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, this game doesn't feature a campaign mode. You can play a "career", but you'll be stuck with the same plane for 20 or 40 missions and the war will progress pretty much the same as it did historically, with only slight variations depending on how well you personally perform. D-Day can occur about a month sooner or later, and the war can end sooner or later. The way SWOTL handled "campaigns" is a lot more fun, because you can actually change the outcome of the war. In this game, D-Day will always occur, and the Germans will eventually lose.

Where are the experimental planes (Do 335, Go 229, Me 163, He 162, etc.)?! Where are the Russian and Italian planes?! I'm still waiting on a WWII game that features Fiats, Macchis, and MiGs! Why can't you fly bombers?! SWOTL so far is the best WWII game for flying bombers. In most of these new games you can only fly fighters, but lining up that Norden bombsight and raining bombs down while fighting off Me109s is really fun!

Also, there isn't a very big variety of "death animations". In other words, when you destroy a plane, what do you see? In this game, the enemy's engine will smoke and it will slowly glide down while the enemy pilot still has control, or the wing will break off in a ball of flame. Most of these types of games don't have a very big variety of death animations. The guys who make these animations need to watch some more documentary footage and create some new stuff!

The Bottom Line
This is a solid WWII aircraft simulation. It is better in some ways and worse in others than Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, but overall it's very realistic and pretty awesome.