Aerofighters Assault “Take these broken wings”, we said to Charlie Brooker, “and learn to fly again, learn to live so free.” He just squinted at us and looked confused. “We want you to review Aerofighters Assault”, we sighed, dismayed by his ignorance of the works of Mister Mister. LYLAT WANK With the notable exception of Pilotwings, flight sims have never really fared well on consoles. You see, in order to really appreciate a flight sim, you need to have spent a few thousand pounds on an array of costly hardware on which to play it a whopping great Demon Seed-style PC and a wildly overpriced “flight yoke” liberally plastered with more buttons than Stephen Hawking has braincells. You also need lank greasy hair, poor social skills, and a pair of trousers that smell like a mouldering towel. Only with this combination of cutting-edge hardware and tragic personal rudiments can one truly absorb the myriad delights of the flight sim: 1) Reading a phone-book sized manual. 2) Nose-diving to the ground on your first seventy three take-off attempts. 3) Pursuing a pixel-sized enemy for fifteen miles over a vista of angular, unconvincing terrain, before being shot down in flames by a bogey you hadn’t even seen yet. And of course, 4) Realizing that, stewardess tongue hockey shenanigans aside, the life of a pilot is actually a terrible bore. That’s what a true flight sim is like. For a console game, however, you need something quick, accessible, and action-packed, which is everything Aerofighters Assault tries to be. Problem is, in doing so, it ceases to be a proper flight sim and it doesn’t cut the mustard as an arcade game, either. TAKE THESE BROKEN WINGS... PLEASE Incredibly, Aerofighters comes from Paradigm, the same team responsible for the only truly decent console flying title in history - Pilotwings 64 (er... unless you count Lylat Wars, too... which, to save face, we won’t). What happened here is anyone’s guess - perhaps they had some work experience kids in. Perhaps they forgot all about it, then had to knock it out during the lunch hour on deadline day. It feels semi-finished, as if somewhere along the way the entire team lost interest and decided to simply release the damn thing. The game itself takes the form of a series of missions, set in all four corners of the globe. In the opener, you’re under fire from a bunch of helicopters and a ‘boss’ character there’s a different one for each stage who looks like either 1) a gargantuan metal spider capable of crushing buildings underfoot, or 2) a piece of inept third-form metalwork sculpture, depending on your mood. Beneath you, an uninspiring Tokyo landscape does its best to convince you that you’re playing an early Playstation title rather than a contemporary N64 release. Later missions, such as the Grand Canyon, are more interesting, although none are truly diverting. PLANES ARE BORING The controls are, frankly, a gigantic pain in the face. Fanastic though the analog control stick is, it’s no match for a full-size yoke when you’re trying to pilot an aircraft. Even with the controls set to the comparatively simple “arcade” mode, keeping an enemy in your sights is a tiresome and frustrating business and even though shooting down your first bogey is a satisfying experience, there’s also the nagging realisation that the time you spent mastering the controls could have been used for playing twenty-seven rounds of Diddy Kong instead. Visually it’s all a bit of a mess. We’ve already mentioned the lacklustre landscapes, although there are also scrappy and indistinct enemy graphics to contend with. The explosions are okay, and the plume of smoke your craft leaves behind as it hurtles to the ground is just dandy, but it can’t make up for the overall Z-grade feel. The music is utterly abysmal it sounds rather like the excruciating slap-bass doodles that crop up inbetween scenes on Seinfeld, but at twice the tempo and with even less finesse. During play, laughable soundbites floats at you through the ether things like “now, you shall die” and the occasional scream or grunt. Presumably this is supposed to add to the excitement. In practice it simply sounds like an airborne ham actors convention. Bizarrely, one of the available player characters (“Hawk”, the obligatory hateful, Aryan yankee scuzzbag) yelps gems like “what a bummer!” each time he gets shot down. You’ll laugh, but not if you paid good money to hear him say it. IT ISN'T VERY GOOD So, those are the points against... and the case for the defence? Well, the two-player ‘dogfight’ mode isn’t bad, although a wider variety of combat arenas would have been nice. If you’re absolutely desperate to act out a few Top Gun fantasies with your mates, you might what to take a gander. Problem is, there’s already another game on the market which contains a decent dogfighting mode and a cracking single-player game. It’s called Lylat Wars, and it eclipses Aerofighters in every department. All in all then, a bit of a stinker. Shame. But then, as we said at the start, this kind of thing has never really been suited to the console market; it’s simultaneously too simplistic to please proper flight junkies, and too fiddly to replace the likes of Lylat Wars. And it’s rough around the edges to boot. So then, in summary: no. SCORE: 40% No, no, no, no, no. And no.

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