Customer Reviews

Wings of Prey: WWII Air Combat

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Here are some things that I would've liked to know about this product before buying:
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Minimum System Requirements For Wings of Prey
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP SP3
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3200MHz
Memory: 1 GB RAM Hard Drive: 10 GB of free space
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7600 256 Mb or ATI Radeon X1650 256 Mb
DirectX: DirectX 9.0c
Sound card: DirectX compatible
Internet connection: 56 kb/s (for online play and to register your copy of wings of prey)
Keyboard, mouse

The Recommended Requirements For Wings of Prey
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP SP3 / Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 / Microsoft Windows 7
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2400 MHz
Memory: 2 GB RAM or more Hard Drive: 10 GB of free space
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 512 Mb or ATI Radeon 4850 512 Mb
DirectX: DirectX 9.0c
Sound card: DirectX compatible with support 5.1
Internet connection: 512 Kb/s (for online play and to register your copy of wings of prey)
Keyboard, mouse, joystick (a version of Thrustmaster joysticks, as the game can be configured by one of the thrustmaster joystick layouts, although everything can be customized)


Wings of Prey: WWII Air Combat is a combat flight simulator. With the right amount of focus placed on the actual flying of the craft to the extremely well done aerial combat. The game comes with several difficulty levels that increase the actual realism of the flying itself and the enemy's skill. There are a variety of missions, including dog fights, and bombing with a large selection of planes to keep any aviation man happy. The game can be played with keyboard and mouse, but a version of the Thrustmaster joysticks such as Thrustmaster T Flight Hotas X is much better suited to play the game with.

Overall it's an excellent game that any combat flight sim junky will love.

Some off hand thoughts:
No actual taking off/ landing at base
On the harder difficulties there is limited fuel/ ammo (no way to restock) but makes it more challenging
Really good graphics & music (would recommend having above the minimum requirements to enjoy the game even more)
Multiple missions for plenty of fun offline (with good replay value)
Online capable for multiplayer missions/ combat
Roughly 45 different planes to fly
Single Missions and Campaign Mode

--Quick Side Note--
This is a game, and while the realism of the flying can be increased with the difficulty level, it is still meant to be played as a GAME, not an actual full on flight simulation. I see lots of people are rating this game low because it's not a real simulator or because it doesn't fly like a real aircraft. So I feel bad for apparently not making the point clear that this is a game and mimics flight (controlling your pitch, rudders, altitude, so you don't crash or spin out) while getting into dog fights in the sky. Sorry to all you real flight simulation junkies who were let down.

Before you buy this game, maybe it would be a good idea to visit the game forum at yuplay.com and see what the actual game players are saying about this game's performance issues.

The game is fun. Skill levels range from a pretty hard Arcade level to a really hard Sim or Realistic level. The forum for the game is full of helpful, knowledgeable people. There are many good flyers playing the game. The graphics are really pretty good. There are some problems with joy stick setup and some other small stuff, but they are not insurmountable if you stick to it.

The difficulty I have experienced seems to stem from the fact that the game developers keep "improving" the game and then mess it up so it is full of glitches. Which may or may not be taken care of in the next "improvement".

So beware, buy the game, it's cheaper here than on the game site, but watch out for the developers " improvements". They may really test your patience.

After years of playing Microsoft Combat Flight Sim games, (The first WWII is mine and my husbands favorite but doesn't work correctly with the joystick on Windows 7), I searched hard to find another WWII Combat flight sim/game that would work well with Windows 7. This one works and is as close as I could get to the older MS games. The one problem we've had is trying to get the joystick set up with the hat switch for looking around the plane. By default, it's set up to make wingman commands. After manually setting up the controls, we are able to look around but it does not snap back to front when you let go of the hat switch. You have to set up a button to reset the camera view. I found this annoying and wonder what the developers were thinking. Other buttons would have been much better for default wingman talk commands. Don't most people use the hat switch to look around? Anyway..this is the only problem we've had with the game so far. In devices, there is a place to set up camera X and Y axis but they don't do anything. We are using the recommended Thrustmaster Joystick for this game so I know that's not the problem, it's a bug in the game. I tried using the latest update patch and found it did not fix the issue and ended up with other annoying problems instead. I had to uninstall the whole game and re-install it from the boxed disk.

I'm a big fan of simulators since 90s and I played lots of them. Recently I enjoyed playing IL2 and less frequently - LockOn.
When I purchased this game I probably expected something closer to IL2 with better graphics and other improvements, mostly related to greater capabilities of modern computers. But this game stands much closer to arcade games than to realistic sims like IL2/LockOn. If you find these games way too complex - you might like Wings of Prey. Otherwise you might not really enjoy it. Also the game is full of small glitches and problems, which makes playing annoying.
So what's good:
- graphics is great. Better than in any flight sim I've seen before;

What's bad (note:I'm always flying on a "simulator" difficulty level):
- There's no time compression! I have to fly for 20 minutes just to reach the target. Damn!
- There's something strange with simulation of your plane's fuel system. When you are flying Hurricane over Britain, you are running out of fuel in about 15 minutes. I have never been a Hurricane pilot, but this seem to be too short. But when you are flying IL2, your fuel gauge always shows a full tank.
- Engine control is ugly. Sometimes you can't adjust the mixture. This leads to an excessive fuel consumption in certain cases.
- Again, controlling prop pitch and mixture with throttle axis is so ugly that I had to remove it completely and use the keyboard instead.
- Damage simulation is lousy. If your engine is damaged and smoking, you might still flying for a long time without any troubles.
- AI is... strange. It's behavior is inconsistent. Sometimes your opponents virtually don't even notice you are here, shooting at them. Other time you will be shot down immediately.
- If you want to play on your own custom difficulty level, you have to readjust it every time you are starting mission. Very time consuming.
- You can't enter your name as a pilot. Not a big deal, but still feels bad.

This was the first combat flight simulator (cfs) game I bought for my new computer system after taking several years off from this type of gaming. It's a great game that allows you to jump right in and get playing quick and have fun by selecting the Arcade mode. This is important to me. While some will thumb their nose at this, I like it because I want to jump right in and fly and shoot stuff down, not spend a month just learning to take off and land without crashing! If a game is good at this then I will continue to play it eventually going into the harder flying modes and even the campaign. If a game takes a ton of time to learn to use it then I lose interest and move on.

That said, there is also Realistic mode and then Simulator mode which have great flight models that allow for more realistic flight characteristics. The graphics are just great. Even in the lower-end graphics mode the scenery and action is very detailed and smooth. And if you have a high-end gaming computer then the graphics just gets better and better. The game installed easily and works very well. There is training modes, tutorial modes, single missions and campaign mode where you have to step through missions and there is a running dialogue and you progress. There are many WWII era planes to fly. There is also the ability to play online and fight head to head or with teams of other players but I have not done that yet.

Since getting my new computer a month ago I have bought four combat flight sims and this is by far my favorite as it balances great graphics and a wide range of playability. If you're a snobbish, hardcore flight simulator this game might not be for you. I have seen many people snub it for it's Arcade mode. But they should give it a try because the simulator modes are quite difficult to fly. But for your average cfs gamer, this is a winner for sure.

just a heads up for anyone who is considering this game. the publisher decided to limit installation/activation to 3 with no ability to recover even if you properly uninstall the game. their website has no support contact. when you lose all 3 of your activations it is gone forever.

I have just about every combat flight simulator that was released since 1991 and WOP GETS MY VOTE as the best yet.

Charles A Grimes

Edit 7/24/2011: I've come to notice in the campaign mode in certain scenarios that your plane will take X amount of damage at certain points in time no matter where it is on the map or at what elevation it may be at or whatever else may be in the air or on the ground. It's amazing that game programmers still resort to doing this even within the last five years.


I bought this mainly as a lower priced test to see how a 777 Studio product performed in anticipation of buying Rise of Flight: Iron Cross Edition (and the Sturmovik games are getting long in the tooth). After gettng one dog of a game (Grid) and the all time worst game series (Company of Heroes) I wanted to make sure I wasn't about to totally waste my money again.

I didn't and haven't had any technical problems with the game installation or play on my W7-64 OS. Most of the graphics are better than I expected, ships in the water being an exception to that. The emphasis on Soviet planes here makes for a nice change of pace although it would have been nice to have a few more US/English models, maybe the P-38 or 39 and the Typhoon.

There's plenty of canned missions to stay occupied with before getting into the us/them dogfight mode. It plays a lot like the original Microsoft Combat flight simulator I had years ago although the missions here don't seem to have quite the edge the MS ones had. There's also plenty of difficulty/realism settings to mess around with.

It's a pretty decent game, way far better than those stinkers I previously mentioned, and a nice introduction to 777 Studios that gave me the confidence to go ahead and get their Rise of Flight. Wings of Prey gets four stars because I need the extra star to give to RIF which is what a PC game can and should be (even if I don't have a powerful enough CPU to take full advantage of it).

I was very reluctant to purchase this game thinking it would be a simple arcade sim with nice graphics. The graphics alone makes this a good purchase but it also turned out to be good flight sim too. It is very scalable to make it as easy or as realistic as you want and there are some very innovative surprises that I will let you discover yourself. I am spending a lot more time playing this than I ever thought I would. There are moments that look so realistic that you may need to pinch yourself but on occasion there are some blunders that will keep you well grounded. Buy it, spend a little time making it right for you and you are sure to enjoy it.

The people who coded this game deserve an award. The people who documented it deserve a prison sentence. Fantastic graphics if you have the recommended hardware. Intriguing historical timeline that will increase your appreciation of the air war. Many of the complaints I see posted here regarding this game are not strictly true. However, I can see how people would think the game has such limitations given the poor documentation. Buy it but be prepared to do web searches to get the most out of it.