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In a Nutshell | |
WHAT I LIKE
| WHAT I DISLIKE
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Overall Impression : B- | |
| Developer: Publisher: Platforms: MSRP: $25 USD | $30 USD for Frontline-59 bundle Original release date: Genre: Player(s): Play time: ESRB Rating: T (for Teen) for: Official site: |
To be considered an "ace", a pilot usually only has to shoot down between 5 and 10 enemy aircraft in a single campaign. A player of an aerial dogfighting video game will usually do this 4 or 5 times over within the first mission. Project Wingman is no exception. So if you're looking for a "simulation" flight sim, then this definitely ain't it. Project Wingman is thoroughly in the category of a casual dogfighting flight sim. It isn't a completely "arcade" dogfighter either, because it does use realistic flight controls and maneuvers, with the player having control of pitch and roll on one stick, and yaw being controlled with shoulder button "rudders".
In typical casual flight sim form, you'll also have dozens of respawning missiles and bombs strapped to the wings of your plane, even though the actual plane model only has like 6 or so. But shooting down enemy planes with the main guns isn't super difficult, with even a tiny bit of rudder practice. I had to retry the first mission I tried (in the VR campaign) because I ran out of ammo. But with more judicious use of my guns in the retry, I cleared the mission with well over a third of my bullets left.
Only the Frontline-59 expansion missions are playable in VR.
But I didn't buy this game to simply play a console dogfighting game. I bought it because I wanted to play with my PSVR2 headset and Thrustmaster HOTAS flight stick. But the game is not entirely VR-compatible on PS5. Only the handful of missions in the "Frontline-59" campaign missions are playable in VR. The actual main game is not playable in VR at all. Worse yet, Project Wingman doesn't seem to support the HOTAS flight stick at all!
It would be nice if I could use the flight stick, and simply map its inputs to gamepad functions (which is possible to do on Steam with un-supported controller peripherals), but as far as I can tell, neither the PS5 nor the game allow this. So I have an expensive flight stick that I now know cannot be used with games unless the game explicitly includes support for it. Score one more for the "PC master race".
After booting up the game and discovering that Project Wingman doesn't fully support PSVR2, and doesn't support the HOTAS flight stick at all, I strongly considered trying to refund the game. And if I had bought the game on Steam, with its generous refund policy, I would have. But I bought the game on PS5, and Sony's refund policy is less generous. If you play the game at all, it is not eligible for a refund unless it is "faulty". So I was stuck with it, and decided to play it anyway. Score a second point for the "PC master race".
I was excited for some kick-ass VR dogfighting action with a flight stick.
Boy was I disappointed!
I'm now seriously doubting if the investment in the PSVR2 headset is going to prove to be worth it in the long run. Just like with Green Hell VR, the PSVR2 version of a game is severely limited in a technical sense, even though the full game is playable in VR on PC. Are developers constraining the PSVR2 versions of their games simply because they lack the motivation or budget to add full support? Or is there some technical limitation of the PSVR2 headset that makes these game impossible to be fully playable in VR on the PS5? Is the PSVR2 going to be a viable VR system in the long run?
Combat ace
VR or no, it doesn't take long to recognize that Project Wingman is a total knock-off of Ace Combat. There is no way around that. Everything from the menu design, to the mission briefings, to the the music, the radio chatter during missions, and even the mission progression itself, pays deliberate homage to Ace Combat. The good news is that Project Wingman hits that exact same sweet spot between arcade dogfighter and flight sim that has made Ace Combat so successful.
Wingman's campaign structure is similar to Ace Combat (with a few notable exceptions that I'll get to later). It's menus are similar to Ace Combat (I can practically hear Ace Combat 4's mission briefing music during Wingman's briefings). Most importantly, it plays like Ace Combat. The control scheme is similar, and feels just as comfortable and responsive. If you;re coming off of Ace Combat 7 and are itching for more of the series' trademark dogfighting action, then Wingman will absolutely scratch that itch!
Project Wingman lacks some of the polish of the AAA Ace Combat games, such as replays.
But the comparisons to Ace Combat also expose some of the weaknesses of Project Wingman. Ace Combat is a highly-polished, AAA production. The games usually feature bells and whistles such as cutscenes between missions, nifty animated breakdowns of the mission during the post-mission debrief, and full cinematic replays so the player cam enjoy the highlights of the mission. Project Wingman has none of that. The story is told entirely through mission briefings and in-mission radio chatter, as well as a catalogue of documents for the player to read. There's no cutscenes, and no fancy replays of the mission that lets the player relive the most exciting moments.
Debriefs highlight how pathetically irrelevant wingmen are.
One problem that Project Wingman shares with Ace Combat (and every other other semi-casual dogfighters that I've played), is that I feel like I have to do absolutely everything myself! Considering the game has "wingman" in its title, I expected the A.I. wingmen in this game to actually, you know, do something! The mission debriefs even make a point of separating the player's kills from the A.I. wingmens' kills, which only highlights that the wingmen are pathetically inept. At best, the wingmen do draw enemy fire, but that is about the only thing that they do.
One thing that Project Wingman may do a bit better than Ace Combat is that Project Wingman has absolutely spectacular explosions! Every enemy plane that gets shot down will explode into a brilliant fireball, and also break apart into dozens of little fireballs that will scatter and streak towards the earth below. It makes every kill look like it belongs on a highlight reel. Which only makes the lack of a replay feature (and any kind of cinematic photography mode) feel all the more sorely lacking.
This game has amazing explosions!
Nothing personal
Gameplay-wise, the single largest deviation that Project Wingman makes from its Ace Combat progenitors is that Project Wingman has honest-to-goodness boss fights (with health bars and everything). Some of the Ace Combat games have had climactic battles with named enemy pilots before, but they were usually only marginally more challenging to shoot down than the standard cannon fodder grunts. In Project Wingman, the player will periodically be required to engage against a nearly-impossibly-difficult "Peacekeeper" force called "Crimson Squadron". These battles are genuinely difficult and will challenge even skilled players.
Unfortunately, a big part of the challenge comes from the fact that boss fights are borderline unfair. The planes can execute maneuvers that the player cannot, and which are the kinds of things that human pilots cannot do without passing out. They are also virtually impossible to hit with missiles due to their endless supply of flares (which, to be fair, the player also has infinite flares). I recommend that you practice with your machine guns in the early missions, so that you are prepared for the Crimson Squadron boss fights, because the guns are pretty much the only way that you can hit these bastards.
I really wish that the difficulty of these boss battles had been toned down just a little bit, and that the skill and threat level of the regular enemy planes were a bit higher. I feel like there's a sweet middle ground between normal enemy types and the bosses which would have given the whole game a much more intense and even challenge curve. As it stands, the difficulty curve for this game is all over the place.
There are boss battles against named enemies, with health bars!
Early missions (on the Normal difficulty) were easy to the point of almost being boring. So after a few missions, I started upping the difficulty to Hard. But by mission 7 or so, the Hard difficulty had become borderline impossible for me on a first playthrough. And there's still another difficulty level that's harder than that! But you have to beat the game to unlock it. Maybe, instead of having an unlockable "extra hard" difficulty level after the Hard mode, there should be a difficulty level between Normal and Hard.
It wouldn't be so bad if there were just mid-mission checkpoints. Quite a few missions will throw an insanely hard difficulty spike at the player at the end of a 30-minute mission, like one of those aforementioned boss fights. But if I die, I have to go back and replay the first 20 minutes of the mission, which I feel I could do in my sleep with 1 hand tied behind my back, and which quickly becomes very tedious.
A lot of this uneven difficulty could also be rectified if most enemy pilots' "skill level" lay somewhere between their current skill level, and that of the Crimson Squad boss fights. Then the missions could be designed such that the player could spend the mission focused on shooting down a handful of enemy fighters, while your wingmen could take on the rest.
Mission 8 is a great example of my frustrations with this game's difficulty balancing. The mission is a neat design ... in principle. The enemy is using civilian passenger aircraft as a cover for moving cargo between battlefronts, and the player must shoot down the cargo planes without shooting down any of the civilian passenger planes. I would think, that such a design would allow for a smaller-scale skirmish, since enemy planes could stick close to the civilian planes and force the player to have to hold your fire until you have a perfectly clear shot. This is how the mission starts.
Mission 8 has an interesting design, but turns into a frustrating gauntlet.
But then things go south real quick. After shooting down the first few enemy cargo planes, the mission degrades into a half-hour long gauntlet of shooting down wave after wave of cargo planes, each escorted by 3 or 4 fighters -- all without hitting a single civilian plane. The interceptors are easy to deal with by using the multi-lock missiles, but these missiles will frequently also target the civilian planes, and are a huge liability. But there are so many escort fighters that if I don't use the multi-lock missiles, I get bogged down in furball after furball that gradually picks away at my health.
Finally, after shooting down almost 20 cargo planes and probably over 50 escort fighters (remember, an "ace" pilot is a pilot who shoots down more than 10 enemy planes in an entire campaign), this mission has the nerve to throw in a boss fight against impossibly hard-to-hit enemy aces and a gunship! The gunship has a near constant missile lock on the player, making it almost impossible for me to stay on any of the fighters long enough to get a hit in, and my targeting system just absolutely refuses to target the gunship. If I took too much damage from the gauntlet of the mission, then this boss fight will easily finish me off, but I also had to restart the mission multiple times because my multi-lock missiles accidentally targeted a civilian plane. And of course, the wingman doesn't do anything during this mission.
Oh, and remember, there are no mid-mission checkpoints. So getting hit and killed in the boss battle meant going back to the beginning of the mission and shooting down those 20 cargo planes again. Accidentally hitting a single civilian plane with a multi-lock missile or errant machine gun, also meant going back to the beginning of the mission. Accidentally crashing into a cargo plane or boss gunship while trying to avoid a missile lock meant going back to the beginning of the mission.
This was probably the most interesting concept for a mission in the entire game, but its actual execution made it easily the most frustrating.
The right tool for the right job
There are quite a few really well designed levels here. They don't quite reach the quality of Ace Combat 7's masterful level design, but again, we're dealing with a game from a smaller team and limited budget.
Weather can limit visibility, act as cover, and divide an arena into different levels.
Clouds are used wonderfully as obstacles and hazards. They often sit fairly low, evenly dividing the play space into ground battles or air battles. Engaging ground targets usually means staying pretty low in order to remain below the clouds. But if you ever need to escape, you can try to drag pursuing enemy fighters up above the clouds to fight plane-to-plane without all the annoying surface anti-air draining your health or forcing you to evade. The clouds themselves will cover the canopy in rain drops and cause the controller to vigorously vibrate, as if your plane is about to fly itself apart.
Some of the cities have massive, mega towers that reach up into the clouds. It's important to make a mental note of where these are so that you don't accidentally run into them while turning to evade a missile lock. And anti-air emplacements will be tucked in between the tightly-packed urban buildings, forcing the player to have to position yourself such that you have a clear line of sight to actually hit the target with a missile (instead of just hitting a building). In general, an awareness of your environment is usually very important, and I found myself using the free look (or turning my head in VR) frequently to scope out my surroundings.
I was also surprised by how often I found good reasons to use almost all of the secondary weapons included in the game. I'm used to getting by in Ace Combat games with just the standard missiles (and bombs for ground targets), but (especially later in the campaign) I found myself experimenting with Project Wingman's different weapons a lot more.
I used a variety of different secondary weapons.
Many missions feature massive, heavily-armed flying gunships (I think the game called them "Air Cruisers"). These airships have multiple hardpoints that all have to be destroyed. They were a great use case for the powerful Semi-Active Missiles, due to the airships' slow speed and limited mobility. And if I was flying a slower strike plane, loaded down with anti-ground weapons, then the shotgun-like flechette gun would be great at quickly tearing through the airships' multiple hardpoints from close range.
Multi-targeting missiles were great for aerial dogfight missions, and multi-target ground missiles were great for supporting land battles. Large, unguided bombs were great at taking down closely-grouped, stationary ground targets or heavily-armored or fortified targets (like bunkers and railguns) that would normally take multiple missiles to destroy. And the unguided rocket proved immensely effective against naval warships with multiple hardpoints, since moving ships often proved difficult to hit with more traditional bombs.
And then there's the high-speed missiles, which travel very fast, but deal less damage. On paper, they seem useless, but they were actually pretty much the only missiles that could reliably hit the ridiculously maneuverable Crimson Squad planes. I never took them into a mission with me on the first attempt, but if I would die to a boss fight against Crimson Squad once or twice, I would go back to the hanger and re-equip my plane with these high-speed missiles.
The multi-lock missiles seem a bit overpowered.
The Multi-lock missiles (both air and ground) still feel a bit overpowered in general. They usually do enough damage to destroy almost any non-boss target in a single hit, and they move faster than regular missiles and are more accurate, and can be fired from longer range.
The right mode for the right tools
If you play the optional Conquest or Frontline-59 expansion missions, then the variety of weapons will get a lot more use. The Conquest Mode is an ironman game mode in which the player can play semi-randomized missions and manage of squadron of NPC wingmen. These missions can optionally be played in additional challenge modes that might give greater utility to certain secondary weapons, as well as allow the player to test your skill with game-enforced challenge runs.
This mode allows the player to purchase different units to act as wingmen and support. Here, they are a lot more effective than the actual named, character pilots of the other 2 campaigns. They act more assertively and shoot down more enemies, especially the higher-level wingmen. The fact that this is an ironman mode (meaning dying forces you to start over from scratch) means that even if the wingmen aren't shooting down enemy planes, they are still useful as distractions and meat shields.
Wingmen are more useful in the ironman Conquest mode.
In fact, this mode might be the one area in which Project Wingman truly surpasses Ace Combat and innovates the casual dogfighter genre. Conquest mode gives tremendous replay value for those who want to keep playing Project Wingman after the credits roll, but who don't want to be stuck replaying the same story missions over and over again. And it does this while still feeling more structured and directed compared to a basic arcade mode. Unfortunately, these Conquest missions are not playable in VR either. If Conquest mode were playable in VR, it would probably have me coming back to Project Wingman time and time again, if I ever have an hour or so to kill.
If you bought this game for the VR, then you have to play the Frontline-59 expansion missions. This is a small campaign that takes yet another page from Ace Combat 4 by being played from the perspective of a group of reserve pilots in the opposing air force! This Frontline campaign only has 6 playable missions, so you're not going to get a lot of VR playtime, nor a robust experience of fighting on the other side of the war.
The VR plays really well. I actually found that a lot of the action seemed closer, and I got a much better look at the airplanes I was shooting down. The VR mode is also able to use eye-tracking to determine which enemy plane to target lock. It didn't seem to work very reliably for me, but that could have been a calibration issue with my PSVR2 headset. Even though the planes and explosions look great in VR, the environments and backdrops suffer from a noticeable drop in detail and quality. Even so, I really wish that the rest of the game were playable in VR, as I absolutely would have played it in VR mode.
The few VR missions that are available are among the highlights of the game.
In fact, I think my favorite mission of the entire game might have been one of the VR campaign missions. It's a difficult mission, but it's difficult in a way that feels fair and makes sense, unlike mission 8 of the main campaign that I mentioned before. The VR mission requires the player to take out enemy anti-air installations in preparation for a bombing raid. Obviously, attacking anti-air installations directly with an airplane is difficult. In any case, the bombing raid itself is quite a spectacle of flak fire and explosions, and playing it in VR allows the player to more clearly witness the mayhem.
Not exactly a PSVR2 showcase, but still a thrill ride
Even though I was disappointed by the lack of flight stick support on PS5, and the limited nature of the VR expansion campaign, I'm still happy I bought and played Project Wingman. I had a lot of fun with it, and it really scratched the itch for more dogfighting action that Ace Combat 7 and Star Wars: Squadrons left me with. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of an actual Ace Combat game, and I did experience some technical issues. There were framerate stutters in some missions, and I had a few freezes and crashes throughout the main campaign. There's also an annoying bug in which the game saves the "toggle throttle and rudder" option in the settings, but it doesn't actually toggle those controls when you launch the game. So every time I booted the game up, I had to go into the settings, uncheck that option, and then recheck it in order for the game to actually switch the controls.
Maybe it's for the best that the whole game wasn't playable in VR. Having a toddler running around means I don't have nearly as much time as I would like to play VR games. If I tried playing the entire lengthy campaign in VR, it probably would have taken me several months longer to get through. Or I may never have completed it, since I may have fallen off of it it in favor of other games. At least this way, I got my money's worth, and had a real good time.
I had to disable and re-enable this option every time I booted up the game.
