The battle for air supremacy on the Nintendo Switch is heating up. With its hybrid uses, the Switch seems to be seeing ever more ports from other platforms. The latest entrant into the airspace is the Air Conflicts Collection from Kalypso Media.
A physical repackaging of the first two Air Conflicts games, Air Conflicts Collection provides well over twenty hours of single player, story focused campaigns. Air Conflicts: Secret Wars follows the timeline of the European and Russian theatres against the Germans, while Air Conflicts: Pacific Carriers focuses on the war in the Pacific between America and Japan. Both games are also available from the Nintendo eShop as individual purchases.
Carrier missions allow players to choose between aircraft types and select squadron pilots.
While both games share some similarities, they are also different enough to make judging them together a difficult call. Air Conflicts: Secret Wars tells a single story, focusing on a young French smuggler and her cohorts as they try to successfully navigate through the madness of World War II in Europe and Africa. Along the way our heroine learns about the fate of her father, an heroic WWI pilot, but a man she knows only from stories.
Each mission involves choosing a single aircraft. Most missions can be skipped if a player finds them to be too difficult, however mission successes reward stars which unlock more advanced aircraft. The available aircraft represent a good mix of English, Russian, and German types. Some rarely seen Russian aircraft such as the [NAME OF RUSSIAN BOMBER] make some good compliments to the usual Spitfires, Messerschmidts, and Mosquitos which the game provides. (Not that this writer will ever complain about getting behind the virtual controls of a Mossy.)
Story in Secret War is told with narration accompanied by some lovely static art.
Controls fall into the relaxed realism, gamepad friendly variety. Unfortunately, there is no option to remap any of the buttons. This writer would have preferred a different configuration for the throttle, rudder, and primary/secondary fire buttons. Another odd quirk encountered during gameplay was that the game refused to recognize right analog clicks on the Switch’s JoyCon controller (required to change views) or D-Pad input on a regular controller, but would recognize the D-Pad style buttons on the left JoyCon, and right analog stick clicks on a controller.
Air Conflicts: Pacific Carriers, tells a broader story with options to play both the American and Japanese sides. In this game, players now take command of an entire squadron’s worth of aircraft, jumping from cockpit to cockpit when each aircraft is too damaged or has exhausted its ordinance. The narrated storyline still focuses on individual pilots, but it also loses some of the individual focus that made Deedee’s story compelling in Secret Wars.
Lining up for a carrier landing is tough even in arcade mode.
Aircraft in Pacific Carriers control similarly to their Secret Wars counterparts, although with a better focus on accurate bombing, and the introduction of low level torpedo attacks. For some reason, however, the rudder in the “realistic” flight control setting feels much different in Pacific Carriers. In the first game, the rudder works as a fine-tuning left/right control much like it does in the Ace Combat series. In Pacific Carriers, the rudder alone brings in more yaw, but the aircraft’s nose tends to point back towards the original flight path when rudder is released. This is closer to how real aircraft work, but an unexpected flight model change between the two games which makes fine tuning ground attacks difficult enough that this writer had to switch back to the arcade flight model when using JoyCons and the Switch in handheld mode.
Graphically, both games appear to be roughly the same as they were in the original PC releases. Fortunately, even a PC-based engine from seven years ago holds up better on Switch hardware than some of the recent mobile ports. Audio in Secret Wars occasionally suffered from random dropouts of narrative lines during missions, and some audio clipping where the total number of sounds seemed to max out. Whether this is a game issue or a hardware issue with the Switch is something that this writer doesn’t know.
Extra points to the full aircraft lineup in Secret Wars for including my favorite German aircraft, the Horten HO 229.
Overall, the Air Conflicts Collection offers a good value for Switch owners looking for some good World War II dogfight action with a solid story, and who don’t own any kind of gaming PC. PC gamers can also find the same games for individual sale on Steam, where they usually see discounts during the major sales events.
Digital copies of Air Conflicts: Secret Wars and Air Conflicts: Pacific Carriers were provided for this review.
