App Name: Winds of Steel by DeckEleven Entertainment
Description:Experience World War II’s most epic and legendary air battles in Asia and Pacific theatres on your Android mobile phone. Play Japanese or Allied Forces. From the attack on Pearl Harbor, and all the way to the bombing of Tokyo, take command of 12 famous Pacific fighters and bombers in a challenging 3D game.
How it works: Controls for Winds of Steel are very simple. As the player you control the fighter/bomber by using your phone’s accelerometer, tilting left and right to steer the plane. To fire you can either use the on screen fire button or use the physical “Ok” button on your phones D-Pad to fire. To change your weapons you press the on screen button below the fire button to change between machine gun and bombs. Throughout the game you will encounter multiple enemies while trying to accomplish your goals. To evade their attacks you have two options. The first is a barrel roll. This is accomplished by turning either hard left or hard right. This results in an icon appearing in the lower left hand corner. Tapping his icon will perform the barrel roll. The second Manoeuvre is a loop. If you pitch hard upwards (tilt up) an icon will appear in the same spot. Tapping the icon, results in a loop being performed. This is the basic premise of the game. Complete each objective and move on to the next level that lay’s ahead.
Opinion: The game it’s self isn’t terrible, but it’s clear that it needs some work and here’s why. The beginning of the tutorial was quite boring. For about a minute you just follow a plane and that’s it, in my 30 seconds would have sufficed. There are a few glitches as well. One example is when crashing on certain levels the Restart and Quit options didn’t come up. I had to press menu on my phone to bring up the standard pause menu. Graphics were subpar and really could use some work. Gunfire floating above the wings just wasn’t very realistic and almost everything had jagged edges. The audio could use some work as well. After I got shot at for long periods I could clearly hear a gun reloading click that seemed to signify I was hit hard it was just very out of place. Lastly the UI isn’t all that consistent. There is no indication of how close to the water/land I was, which resulted in me crash quite a few times in certain levels. With that there is the health bar; it’s just this faded white line to the left of the screen. And nothing indicated that was my health bar until I had been under heavy attack and I finally saw it depreciate. There are also times when I had to take off of an aircraft carrier and there is nothing that said the fire button is what initiates take off.
Ratings :
- Speed (3/5) – Lag was apparent from time to time through the game
- Features (2/5) – Two game modes, Campaign and Instant Action. Instant Action is basically campaign with new rules.
- Theme (5/5) – The main menu audio and graphics suited the game and the missions really give you a brief history lesson.
- Overall (3/5) – The game doesn’t provide anything that’s draw dropping. But it is a great application to kill some time.
Pro:
- Simple Controls
- Instant Action Mode
- Brief Overview of WII
Cons:
- Apparent glitches
- Inconsistent UI
- Repetitive/Lousy Audio
- Mediocre Graphics
Conclusion:
Despite the minor inconveniences, and if you can overlook look them you’ll enjoy it. But overall it’s nothing spectacular. It takes you through some brief history of the most legendary battles. Other than that it really doesn’t push the envelope and doesn’t have to. It just would have been nice to see some decent graphics, UI and Audio without noticeable bugs.