I've been looking for a modern WWII style arcade flight sim for a long time. It is quite surprising how thin they are on the ground with so much interest in using WWI and WWII over the years for games.

Finally we might have a real contender in Heroes over Europe.

Recently Tom Clancy's HAWX showed how an arcade flight sim could be made properly and that was great fun, but set in the modern world. From what I've read Heroes over Europe is using the same, or similar, game engine.

HoE is set in WWII, starting off with you flying a Hurricane, and as you progress you earn different fighters to fly, aiming eventually to get the famous Spitfire.

The graphics looks really nice, especially if you have a GFX card that can handle AA set to 4x, but even with AA switched off it still looks good.

I've been playing the game using an Xbox 360 controller and the game works very nicely with the dual sticks and triggers. Left stick to control plane movement, right stick forward/back controlling the throttle and left/right controlling the roll, and the right trigger controlling the guns.

The only annoying thing is that the game doesn't quite adapt properly to the 360 controller. It allows full control using it to navigate menus and control the game, but all on screen control pointers are still shown for the keyboard, so you have to randomly try to work out which button it is mapped to on the controller. But other than that I've not has any issues.

Controlling the planes is really easy with the 360 controller and you don't get disoriented in dog fights as you often do in other flight sims. This makes it great fun shooting down German planes and doing strafing runs at vehicles.

So far missions have begun and held together by comms from your computer controlled wing leader, giving instructions on where to go and what to do. This works well and is backed up by coloured arrow markers around the landscape and marking enemy planes, so you always know where you need to be heading, or where your targets are.

So far I give the game 8/10. Great graphics, polished gameplay that is very easy to pickup and play. And some great arcade dog fighting action.
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