AIRFIX DOGFIGHTER
I have shifted the aim in my life like people change their clothes everyday. Once I had decided I wanted to be David Hasselhoff after watching him in Knight Rider, and after sometime when McGyver hit the peak o f success I wanted to be someone like Richard Dean Anderson, Nowadays my interest is more to being a lifeguard. But when I saw a WWII dogfight movie I knew that I was destined to be a fighter pilot. This one actually stuck in my mind. It is true that it got suppressed due to other sudden and temporary wishes but every once in a while I had the irresistible urge to be in air with a WWII fighter plane, shooting down enemy planes with my bullet-spitting machine-gun. Well my wishes were almost answered with the release of Airfix Dogfighter. Well I mentioned "almost" cause it is a game that has WWII fighters all right but all are model-kit planes and the battle arena is a large house, empty cause the occupants have left for a vacation. And its up to you to choose a side either The Allies or the Axis and take to the skies, well not to the skies, but let your imagination take over.
Paradox's
Airfix Dogfighter is a game that will provide you some quality fun time.
It has excellent gameplay, great graphics, great options and all that is
required to make a game successful. Well there is a problem, but if you
only take that as a problem. I will talk about that later.
At first let us take a look at the game's qualities. These were written on the game box, "Airfix Dogfighter is a fun and action based flight simulator with model airplanes. The Scenery is a large house where all of the family has hone away, all but you. You take the role of a prank loving, imaginative, "Home Alone" kind of kid, roaming around your with your self-made airplanes pretending to be a fighter pilot of the WWII." Well these sentences were good enough for me to get myself this game. The game provides some excellently developed missions, which unfolds one by one as you successfully carry out the duties bestowed upon you. In the first Allied mission you have to go out into open area to kill enemy tanks and engage in a dogfight with an Axis airplane. The game provides three different views for the game to be played. One from the traditional third person perspective, one a little far behind and the third one is overhead for a more accurate bomb drop. I personally like the traditional Third Person perspective, but it is necessary to go into the overhead mode in different parts of the game. You earn points for shooting down enemies and that decides your rank after each stage. There is a really cool thing to the game. You can break the Chinaware and vases and showpieces on the shelves in different rooms. On breaking them you get power-ups like ammunition, oil, tech level improvement items and loads of different weapons. There are a total of 10 different weapons and each of them differs from each other in tech and magnitude level. Your arsenal starts off with just the machine gun but as you get going you will find pickups like drop down bombs, air to air missiles, homing missiles, tesla coil (this weapon is great) and an Atom bomb!!! Well I never got that even though I finished the whole game. Must have missed it somehow. All the necessary things are shown on the bottom of the game screen while you are playing. There is a radar on the bottom right corner of the screen that pinpoints pick-ups and enemies. The game features 20 missions, 10 missions a side. You receive new aircrafts and weapons as you move onto the each new stage. The game maintains a roster of users and that makes the menu neat and clean and fairly simple. There are 14 WWII model aircrafts and they are very well done and as I said earlier the level designing is top notch and deserves a really good round of applause. The plane looks are customizable and you can do that by going into a paint room and creating stickers to give your plane a more personal look. The painting is done using a paintbrush type utility but it is a lot difficult to use. You can make new levels by using the level editor. I didn't use it that much and I will let you guys figure it out yourselves. The game supports multiplayer action so you can invite your pals to get into some really great dogfights. The game supports up to 8 players over LAN or the Internet.
The
controls of the game are very simple and they are easy to master. I played
the demo a lot of times before I got my hands on the whole game, so I had
no problem at all. However, anyone, even first timers in Flight Sims
should be able to master the controls in no time at all.
The music and sound FX really takes you into the action. The drum beats during the mission briefing really gets one going and the in-game music are well chosen. The Sound FX is best heard using a good sound card and atleast a sub-woofer speaker. Normal speakers will do but the thundering of the machine gun won't seem so real.
Now for the game's cons. There is not much really. But it hurts me to say the game doesn't provide that sting for the gamers. The game rarely gets difficult, but the developers made up for this flaw in the last level. The last Allied level is a killer. I had 18 crashes before I won the level. So the gamers who want some good challenge might just want to push up the game difficulty level.
Without this flaw the game is a perfect example for a great game. I would recommend you to go out and buy it as soon as you can. Any type of gamer should find this game worthwhile and a good investment.
