I got a wild hair up my butt and wanted to play a WWII dogfighting game. I’m not an avid partaker of the aerial combat genre, but I enjoy it on occasion. My PS3 came with a demo for a Blazing Angels game that I never took off it because it was a fun distraction between games. I was looking around Steam for a dogfighting game and came across Flying Tigers: Shadows over China. It grabbed my attention for being: 1. Cheap and 2. About a part of WWII often overlooked.

First up, the graphics. You can tell pretty early on this is a budget title game. The main menu graphics look cheap from the carboard cutouts of characters on the start menu to the generic looking menu lists. They do have a neat effect where the mission select screen types out your next mission like a typewriter and the briefing screens are set up like a field report you received. I do think this is a game by a foreign dev because some of the sentences sound a bit off. Not wholly awful, just off kilter enough to notice. The in-game graphics are serviceable. Planes and boats are easier to model than people. Each style of plane has enough detail that you can identify what it’s meant to be. The landscapes of Southeast Asia you zip around look alright. The texture work isn’t super high detail on the natural features, but the ancient stone temples and airfield hangars all look good enough. The rain & snow effects add a nice layer to world spaces. The most stand out map for me was the peaks of the Himalayas during a snow storm.

There’s about 12 missions total you play through that cover different parts of the Flying Tigers campaign. They cover the start of the American Volunteer Groups expedition to its close, fighting over the skies of Burma, Thailand, and China. You don’t exclusively play as the American Tigers though as the RAF was also lending it’s support to Republican China. It’s a 50/50 split of playing as AVG and RAF pilots. Each level is often multi staged and you hop around to different aircraft. You may start out in a heavy bomber attacking a fortified ground location, then switch to a torpedo plane to sink a cruiser, before finally finishing off as a dogfighter shooting down Japanese aces. The levels are the right length with just enough variety to keep up the fun, action movie pace.

Flying Tigers: SOC is a bit more of an arcade-y aerial combat game. There’s a Max Payne bullet time mode for lining up shots easier and you only have to worry about forces like gravity, drag, and angle a little bit. The arcade control style makes it so you automatically do a barrel roll with the push of a button and you steer your plane more like a car. Smartly, they do give you an option of choosing a more realistic control scheme, still not 100% realism, but it let’s control your rudder and felt more natural to me. It’s close to a GTA V style of flying. When you hone in on an enemy aircraft, the game does give you the mercy of showing how far ahead you need to aim to hit your target as well as a little health bar. Again, very arcade like, but appreciated.

The heavy bomber missions were my least favorite, until I figured them out. For smaller planes equipped with bombs you just see a target reticule hover on the ground to show where it’ll land. With heavy bombers, you enter the bomb sight first, then drop your payload. Now when you enter the bomb sight you can still freely move the camera around, like you’re aiming it, but whatever you do, don’t touch the camera. When you enter the sight, it’s aiming exactly where the bombs will land. I don’t know why they give you the option to twirl it around, but I was getting frustrated when I felt like I effectively carpet bombed an airfield just to hear the pilot say “Bombs missed”. Maybe I’m overestimating them thanks to other games and movies, but he bombs here didn’t seem to be very explosive either. There seemed to be little to no splash damage taken into account. You either hit the target directly or whiffed it. The button mapping for controls isn’t the most effective either. You drop bombs with O button, but if you hold the O button it enters the “bombing view”, but the minute you tap to hold the O first it drops the bomb, defeating the purpose of the bombing aim view. Holding the machine gun button is supposed to cool them down when overheated, but it just kept firing the guns instead.

This game is very buggy overall. I had to actively fight the game to play it. There seemed to be something screwy with the loading screens that I couldn’t find a fix for. I may noy be able to explain this well, but more often than not the loading screen would freeze. You could still start the level, and you’d hear the level playing and you had control of your aircraft, but the screen was still frozen on the loading screen. I would crash my plane and hit the button I knew cancelled the mission which also crashes the game back to desktop for me to try again. Sometimes between mission checkpoints where you switched to a different plane, the game would go black. Same as the frozen loading screen, you could still control and hear everything, just not see. After playing one level I got in the habit of restarting the whole game, because trying to go directly onto the next mission usually led to it freezing up. I tried, and am still trying, but I cannot get the final level to load at all. It’s disappointing this game is so poorly optimized because the gameplay is solid.

As for the story and the history this game is based off of, it’s very surface level. Don’t expect to learn an in-depth or wide overview of the Flying Tigers history to be covered here. The beginning does detail the creation of the AVG. How FDR let the pilots “retire” from the American military to go fly in the Chinese air force as contractors. It let America officially stay out of the war, but still fight back against the Japanese. It doesn’t matter too much, because only a few days later Pearl Harbor happens. After that, you get little debriefs before each mission. These could all be based on actual battles of the campaign, but they also feel like generic war missions, “Stop the Japanese bombers”, “Shoot down the fighters patrolling the Burma Road”, etc. I would’ve preferred more context. Something like a History Channel narration over a map or historic photos would’ve been enough. They drop the name Claire Lee Chennault a lot, but never really go into detail about how he’s the commander of the AVG. There is some banter between the pilots in missions, usually busting each other’s balls. I did like the inclusion of the RAF pilots blaming mechanical issues on gremlins.

All in all, if you want a WWII dogfighting game, Flying Tigers: SOC will get the job done. It’s a working man’s, budget title. It gives you some decent aerial combat gameplay in old warbirds. The story is barebones and getting the levels to load properly is a different type of gameplay all to itself. With the buggy nature of the game, I would say wait till it’s on a deep sale, like I did, if you want to give it a try.