Page 4
Preview: Rowan's Battle of Britain
By Bob "Groucho" MarksWeapons and Damage
The weapons and damage modeling is also superb. Managing your ammunition is extremely challenging, particularly when flying for the Luftwaffe. Wanna feel naked? Run your magazines dry over Southern England some time. Damage is likewise well done. When flying for the Brits, it’s extremely challenging to bring down a Dornier (Do-17) with the limited store of wimpy deer-rifle caliber ammo or slow-firing cannon (depending on the variant) with which your early model Hurricane is armed. The best bet seems to be spraying the cockpit with rounds---if you just shoot at the tail of a Do-17, or "Flying Pencil" as they were called, you may have to bail-out of a smoking plane before you finish the job. The same goes for the Me-110, while exhibiting flying qualities more akin to a commuter airliner than a fighter, it can concentrate a withering fusillade of lead. Should you be foolish enough to linger in front of an Me-110 Zerstörer it will easily re-kit your RAF fighter with new and airframe-unfriendly vent holes.
Alright then, enough fawning. Battle of Britain is indeed the dogfighting sim to have at the moment. That, however, is only part of the attraction--BoB is also a strategy game.
A bad day over the beach.
Control Freak
Battle of Britain sports a very detailed campaign engine, one that allows the control freak in all of us to mastermind the air war in our own monomaniacal way. A very deep animal, the campaign engine in BoB can be a subject of a protracted “how-to” series all its own--but not from this kid. [Editor's Note: A Campaign review and guide planned after the North American release] I enjoy flying the airplanes, and even the occasional stint as a gunner on the Luftwaffe bombers. Micromanaging an entire battle really doesn’t interest me all that much--and I’d be willing to bet that I’m in the majority there. I enjoy dabbling in it, primarily by calling out important targets, or building gorilla packages, for example. To be honest, however, I could care less what my allocation schedule looks like or what JG21’s morale is. Who knows--over time, I may get further into it. The power of the campaign isn’t completely lost on the non-grognards like yours truly, however.
The campaign makes one helluva powerful random mission generator, and that is what gives sims like BoB a hard drive life far beyond that of lesser games like CFS2. The campaign is a great tool for immersion, even if you only muck about in the periphery of its capabilities. The notification filter is a powerful tool in and of itself: simply set the campaign in motion, select what if any preferences in squadrons you have, and wait for the fun stuff to happen.
The belly gunner's station is a great place to observe a strike.
This “fun stuff” occasionally includes flying aboard one of the Luftwaffe bombers as a gunner. This is very well done, and has immersed me to such a degree that I’ve gotten a bit queasy. The action of pointing the gun in one direction while the AI pilot flies in another can be quite disorienting, and gives one a good taste of the desperate challenge those poor buggers assigned to a German bomber endured. From a practical standpoint, flying along in a mission you’ve tasked in the campaign manager gives good “real time” information as to the success or failure of a strike mission.
The pre-Gold release copy I have does have a few stability problems, with the sim freezing occasionally after leaving the 2D campaign screen. It’s a good idea to follow the MiG Alley mantra---save early, and save often.
The lightplay rendering is very well done.
