Red Wings: Aces of the Sky – Review (Switch)

By Dave Lambden Last updated May 21, 2020

If you poll even a small handful of former OG Xbox owners about what some of their favorite games were, I can guarantee at least half of them will mention Crimson Skies. It’s no surprise – High Road to Revenge was a fantastic game for so many reasons. Not least of which is because its aerial arcade combat genre has been mostly devoid of notably entries for some time.

The developers at All In Games have taken flight to finally change something about that with Red Wings: Aces of the Sky. Finding what could be the perfect home on the Nintendo Switch, what with its portability and simplified couch co-op capabilities, Red Wings has the potential to be a staple for your Switch library. We’re sad to report however that Red Wings mostly fails to deliver on these lofty goals.

Set against the backdrop of the first world war, Red Wings allows you to take control of either the Triple Alliance or the Triple Entente. The former focuses on the Ottoman Empire and Germans as they try and push back the other European powers to victory. The latter puts you in the pilot seat of French and English fighters as you track down the infamous and elusive Red Baron. It was great to see the developers choose The Great War as a setting as most games generally default to the second world war. The pursuit of Manfred von Richthofen in the Entente campaign was also intriguing. The Baron, however, doesn’t make much of an appearance throughout the campaign and is relegated primarily to references in cutscenes.

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Story plays out in comic book style panels with old style radio voice overs. Every few levels, one of these cutscenes will play giving some context to where you are in the war. However, these didn’t help to convey much importance to the missions. Not being an expert on war, I wasn’t really sure if the missions I was playing through had any relation to major battles from the war itself. As a result, nothing I was doing in game felt all that important – there were no set pieces or sense of impact in moving through the campaign. On the other hand, the visuals are a major standout of Red Wings. The cell shaded graphical style was endearing and added a lot of character to the game. This sort of arcade aerial combat game is perfect for quick pick up and play sessions in portable mode. However, you’re really missing out if you don’t try Red Wings in docked mode. The game looks undeniably stunning on a big screen.

Despite the fantastic visuals, the real shortcomings in Red Wings are in the game play. The game feels and controls as well as it needs to. Gun fire and zooming is mapped to the shoulder buttons, with movement and camera on the sticks, and special abilities on the face buttons. The problem is the monotonous missions and repetition. Each mission is so one dimensional and asks that the player only complete one of a small handful of tasks. Some missions only require you to eliminate four or five defenseless blimps, while another will ask that you clear out all enemy planes. A third mission type sees you defend a set of your own allied blimps against enemy planes. The trouble is it all feels pretty much the same from mission to mission. It would have been appreciated if different parameters were blended into individual missions. This would have gone a long way to making things feel varied from stage to stage.

The outlier mission types are bombing runs and endurance courses. These objectives try to change up the pace but without much success. In bombing runs the camera switches to an overhead view that follows along as your slow moving bomber dodges anti-air from the surface. But, aside from dodging incoming fire, all you have to do is hit the fire button when your target is vaguely close to an objective on the ground. The endurance missions were easily the least fun and most tedious part of the game. These missions have no enemies and ask that you navigate through a course of balloon checkpoints before your rapidly depleting fuel tank runs out. Some of these courses have over forty checkpoints and, if you miss one, you’re usually doomed to start again. Missing a target right at the end of the course was incredibly frustrating.

Replay values comes by way new planes and skins that can be unlocked as you progress through the story and achieve new high scores. Further to this is a star ranking system at the end of each mission. Success is determined by a scoring system that rewards chaining kills together in quick succession as well as finishing a mission as quickly as possible. Getting kill combos was challenging but rewarding as it takes a lot of skill and quick thinking to keep chain above four or five kills. It was puzzling that parameters for achieving different star levels aren’t shown until after you complete a mission. You have no idea what you need to do to get three stars until you finish the run. Stars that are earned can be spent on enhancing one of four special abilities. A fatal takedown skill allows you to finish off an enemy near death. A comic book style animation plays when you trigger this skill that shows your pilot pulling out a gun and sniping an adversary. However this animation quickly becomes repetitive. It’s also often easier to just hold the fire button down to finish enemies off rather than triggering this skill.

The barrel roll allows you to temporarily become immune to enemy fire and the quick comeback allows you to swing your plane suddenly in the opposite direction. Both of these skills look great on screen and are sure to come in handy on a regular basis. Rounding out your special skills is the squadron ability. This allows you to call in up to four friendly fighters to take a few pot shots a targets in your sight. More often than not, the squadron ability helped to suppress enemies rather than actually eliminate them, but was useful nonetheless. Stars can be invested in these abilities to increase their effectiveness and reduce cooldown. Other passive perks can also be unlocked to enhance fuel capacity and suppress machine guns overheating among other things.

We’d be lying if we didn’t say we had incredibly high hopes for Red Wings: Aces of the Sky. It’s been a long time since we had a memorable arcade aerial combat game like Warhawk or Crimson Skies. Unfortunately we’ll have to keep waiting as Red Wings mostly disappoints. There is no doubt that this is a visually impressive game with a healthy amount of replay value. It’s also easy to pick up and play either alone or with a friend. But the core gameplay gets stale way too quickly and won’t be able to keep your attention for long.

Red Wings: Aces of the Sky releases on Nintendo Switch on May 21st, 2020.