Well, this little beauty certainly slipped in under the radar! As a self-confessed flight sim geek, I usually keep an eye out for any all too rare releases, but first I knew about this one was when it plopped onto my doormat, courtesy of those kind chaps at Gamecell, and I’m glad it did. The time was, back in around about the Prehistoric era of PC gaming, that a new flight sim would be greeted with fanfares, billboards and massive publicity stunts involving fly pasts and various old war horse heroes being wheeled out (or wheezed out?) to endorse the product. After all, there was sod all else worth playing on a PC back then! Nowadays, new flight sims are announced with whispers and rumours on the various specialised aviation forums, and are usually delivered in a plain brown wrapper, so as not to arouse suspicion. “New flight sim? - No, no - it’s just porn, honest!”

Flight sims don’t usually ‘do’ atmosphere, but this one delivers pretty well, with suitable period rock music playing in the background while you load up your plane with death dealing hardware to flatten the Vietnamese countryside. And such choice! Hmm, shall I load up with lots of little bombs, or a couple of big ones? Oh, and I’d better take some Napalm, and some missiles and rockets maybe… Damn, no room for my toothbrush! The atmosphere continues once you get flying with sounds and graphics all contributing to a sense of being ‘right there’.
The sim comes with the usual range of choices, from ‘Instant Action’ where the aim is to bomb and shoot down everything in sight, right up to full-blown campaigns.

The visuals, although not up to the modern graphical wonders of Doom 3 and Half Life 2, are good-looking and perfectly adequate for this type of game. The important bits like the cockpit and external views of the planes are very nice indeed. There’s nothing quite like watching a squadron of Phantoms cruising over the Central Highlands, festooned with every possible type of bomb, missile, gun pod, napalm canisters, drop tank, etc. “Moohahaha”! It’s a wonder the bloody things got off the ground with all that weight! As a former real world Phantom pilot, I can tell you that the flight characteristics of the various jets are exactly as I remember them during my tour in ‘Nam. Oh, alright then, I admit it. I’ve never flown a bloody plane in my life, but the handling of the planes certainly ‘feels right’ to an armchair wannabe like me.

In conclusion, then, don’t be fooled by its low-key release. Wings Over Vietnam is a great Combat Flight Sim. You can play it at any level, from hard core by the numbers sim, to easy shoot ‘em up arcade mode. So if you are thinking of getting into combat flight sims, this is a good one to start off with. As the game uses the Strike Fighters game engine, you have access to all the millions of mods created by that community, including loads of new planes, weapons, campaigns, et al, all for free. Excellent. And finally, it will run smoothly on steam powered PCs as well as the latest shiny hardware. Oh, and it’s cheap too. So buy it, ok?