Geryk Pre-Analysis: Down in Flames
Brooski - Columns - Comments - 06/20/05
Playing Down in Flames without the campaigns is like playing an RPG without quests. It’s great fun, but what’s the point? Campaigns put each mission in context. At the beginning of each campaign turn, you allocate aircraft to areas on a campaign map. Your opponent (or the AI) does the same thing. When you’re done, each area that has opposing planes in it generates a mission, which you then fly like one of the solo games. Once all the missions for that turn have been flown, you’ll score points for bombing (or defending) objectives, and re-allocate your pilots.
You remember that thing about pilot fatigue? That’s going on big time in the campaigns. Tired pilots are as brittle as [insert ghey console reference here], so flying pilots with a lot of fatigue is sometimes worse than flying no pilots at all. It’s not so great to be in the last four turns of a campaign and not have any bombers left to do the bombing because you got all your fighters shot down in the first two turns and then got your unescorted bombers chewed up in the next two. Because players allocate their planes simultaneously on the campaign map, trying to outguess your opponent makes the game very tense even when you’re not actually in combat. It’s a great feeling to see your two freshest FW-190 pilots show up in the skies over Berlin to face a tired P-47 who has lost his wingman.
You can’t fly your own pilots in the campaign. This is solely for balance reasons, as a few experienced pilots can seriously unbalance a game. Unfortunately, as the game stands you can’t even rename your campaign pilots, leaving you to manage such luminaries as “L1” (leader 1) and “W7” (wingman 7). Neither do your generic pilots (as the game currently stands) gain experience in the campaign missions. This takes nothing away from the competitiveness of the game itself, but robs it of a little flavor. According to Battlefront, while these features currently don’t exist in the game, at least some of them may be added before release.
These are pretty minor issues in the end because Down in Flames itself is an incredible game, and the computer version is shaping up to do the boardgame justice. Battlefront declined to directly translate the card graphics to the computer, but the underlying play mechanics are very much the same, so that while you won’t be selecting from different playing cards to make your move, the interactive mechanisms are completely preserved. And the rather mundane cards have been replaced with nice animations and sounds. What it all boils down to is a turn-based game that plays quickly, is tense and involving, and makes you want to play again and again. At a time when wargames seem to be competing on the ability to model details, it’s great to see one that’s actually competing as a game.
Note: There’s a beta demo is scheduled for July sometime, and the retail release should be by late summer. Here is the official page and here is a Solomon Island campaign AAR, featuring the designer.
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