Wings of Glory

Give me control of a fighter cockpit and you won't get me out. Wings of Glory from 1995 is a hybrid between a simulator and tactics that looks like it wants to be everything at once, but doesn't excel at anything. Yet it has its cult following — precisely because it unconventionally throws itself between genres.

You play in the chaos of WWII aircraft. You either pilot your fighter or bomber from the cockpit through maps to individual gun turrets. The game gives you freedom — and immediately teaches you to hate it. You switch between three camera angles, which is interesting on paper, but in practice your wings lose orientation and you're fumbling around trying to figure out what's actually happening.

The flight controls behave like this — they don't respect the sequence that someone used to simulators like A-10 Tank Killer or Falcon would expect. Flying control is dumbly command-based, as if the aircraft were running on invisible rails rather than through air. When you decide to engage the enemy, which is really the only thing that can be fun, you discover the cameras fly like mad, and shooting looks like someone's rolling dice behind your back. You don't even know if you hit until the enemy suddenly vanishes off screen.

Yet — and here's the interesting part — when the game clicks, when you simply stop fighting the system and just fly, it's pleasant evening entertainment. Graphics for OS/2 and DOS were decent for the nineties, the music keeps things pretty brisk. In a collection of games from that era, it stands out for not being conventional, for nobody remembering the rules and everyone having to make them up again.

To today's player, Wings of Glory offers a glimpse of when simulators weren't industrialized yet, when developers dared to experiment even at the risk of confusion. It's not Falcon or Il-2, but when you fire it up in your browser, you'll quickly understand why it was written about quietly in the nineties. It wasn't good. But it was different.