Wing of Darkness

Genre: Combat Flight Sim

Players: 1

.

Review:

(Note: This review has been directly sponsored by a kind donation from Jamie and His Cats. Thanks again for your generous contribution!)

Wing of Darkness is a Combat Flight Simulation game released in 2021 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch. This game puts players in the role of one of a group of young women called “frauleins” who pilot super-versatile aircraft called “held systems” against unknown enemy aircraft called “blankers”. Interestingly enough, even though story is somewhat important in this game, this element of it takes a background seat to… interpersonal relationships?

Yes, while the frauleins are busy training and taking on missions to combat this mysterious threat, you’ll be getting treated to lengthy story segments following the friction between and gradual softening of the ladies as their dynamic with each other develops, as narrated in Japanese over pre-rendered still scenes between missions that are surprisingly lengthy.

Once you get past these, the game itself has decent 3D visuals, with some nice intricate-looking aircraft. The scenery around you is decent too, as long as you don’t look too closely, where you’ll see it’s lacking detail and has repetitive textures. This is all joined by appropriately cinematic music, and the chatter of the girls as they banter and shout out warnings and tactics… all stuff us English-speaking folks will not absorb at all unless we tear our eyes away from the action to read subtitles.

The action itself feels great, with your aircraft being highly mobile, and having a few options for each of its three weapons that you can equip before each mission. Both the weapons and your health will refill over time as long as you can take a breather, so you’ll often find yourself unloading on enemies, swapping to an alternate weapon when you run dry, and then dashing around to dodge when you start taking fire to give yourself a moment to heal.

There are a few problems with the actual combat though. Everything is moving so quickly that you’ll have trouble hitting anything unless you lock on with a homing weapon, and when you do lock on, everything becomes effortless. Plus, the unlimited recharging ammo means you don’t need to save your homing weapons for the bigger threats – just let loose until you’re out and wait a few seconds. As a result of this, combat quickly becomes pretty brainless. What’s more, when you do take enemy fire, it’s often unclear where it’s coming from, so your best bet is to just randomly dodge like crazy.

It’s a shame that the combat in Wing of Darkness is so mindlessly simple, because movement is so wonderful. And the focus on characters, while surprisingly good, can be a bit long-winded and ultimately leaves the actual enemy you’re fighting in the story as an afterthought. With a little more tweaking to the gameplay, story, and pacing, and perhaps with an English dub, this could have been a solid Action game. As-is, it’s enjoyable but feels somewhat lacking.

tl;dr – Wing of Darkness is a Combat Flight Sim that has players flying a versatile aircraft against mysterious enemy attackers. The movement in this game feels great, but the combat is far too simple and the story’s pacing is too slow. This can still be enjoyable, but it definitely feels like it could have used more work.

Grade: C+

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