Aces of the Luftwaffe: Squadron (PS4) Review
Release Date: 11/16/2017
Date Played: 7/2/2021
This game is the definition of a Euroshmup in every sense of the word. It's a budget release and has the feel of a mobile game. This isn't surprising considering the developer, Handy Games, has a rather extensive track record of making mobile games. Even more surprisingly, this game received a physical release with all of the DLC included on disc. While this game isn't great and there are certainly more deserving titles who haven't received at physical release, I do commend Handy Games for putting out a product that you can actually put on your shelf.
You play as a team of fighter pilots returning to the US after WWII only to discover the skies have been invaded by Nazi planes. Surprise! Your job is to shoot them down over the course of 25 levels of wide-screen vertical scrolling shmup action. These levels are broken up into 5 campaigns of 5 levels each. There is a story of a bunch of Nazi commanders and their crazy ships who you have to dispatch before finally killing the big bad boss. The player's ship models look pretty good and have a nice design for being so basic and traditional. The backgrounds are very plain, but enemy bosses have a really nice and bizarre design that is usually centered around some theme like an eagle, a scorpion, train, boat, flying saucer. They are all pretty intricate and nice to look at and have a cool spin on the sprite work you would see in the Metal Slug franchise. Obviously, that was a huge influence on the design of this game. There are a lot of cut scenes in this game with character portraits that look straight out of a mobile phone game. They look very cheap and cartoony in a way that is very unappealing. These cut scenes are fully voiced, but the voice actors are clearly not native English speakers and they have very, very heavy German accents. There's nothing quite like hearing a guy that sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to voice a burly cowboy from Texas. It's all very painful to listen to and the translations aren't great to begin with which leads to a lot of awkward dialog. While it teeters on the, "so bad it's good" category, it never really gets there and feels more "cringey" than campy. These constant cut-scenes and their dialog do a lot to take you out of the action and make the experience more tedious than it needs to be.
The gameplay has an interesting spin that I haven't seen before. You play as a squad of 4 different characters that fly in formation. There's the ace pilot, the butch cowboy, the energetic sidekick, and the snarky female mechanic. They are all controlled simultaneously but mostly function in a passive sense. Each of these characters are leveled up individually and have their own skill tree. These skill trees add more health, firepower, active and passive abilities, drop rates, etc. While this is a cool idea which I do like... and it serves to motivate you to keep playing, but it's the hallmark of poor shmup design and a key component of most Euroshmups. Unfortunately, the squad formation takes up a lot of real estate on the screen and is a huge target for the enemy. Each of the 4 characters has their own health bar and if any of them other than the main pilot are shot down , they drop out of the fight until a cooldown timer completes. This happens quite frequently, but luckily the cooldown timer is pretty forgiving and they return to the action rather quickly. The enemy placement and bullet patterns within the levels is very poorly thought out and not interesting at all. Truthfully, it's some of the worst I've ever seen and looks to be just copied and pasted over and over again. Often the enemies will just fly in a grid formation and shoot straight ahead like a blanket. You're supposed to use your upgrades to tank the damage rather than learning routs and patterns to avoid them. The enemies never really shoot at you. Instead they just cover the screen in bullets and the developers rely on your upgrades to help sort out the mess. While playing, you pick up many different pickups that increase your firepower. You'll have homing missiles, flame throwers, chain guns, lasers, and more. Unfortunately, these all just come in a predetermined pattern and there's no strategy other than just getting more and more overpowered. To top things off, these upgrades have limited ammo. So, if you don't pick up the next upgrade in time, you revert down a level. This is such a bad design choice. Because of this very cookie cutter gameplay loop, the game becomes very monotonous very quickly. The mobile phone game feeling starts to shine through and that mindless grinding feeling sets in.
In an attempt to counteract the staleness of the game, the developers added in an extremely idiotic feature where every member of your squad has some sort of chronic ailment that throws a wrench into the gameplay. The main pilot has "motion sickness" that causes his plane to jerk around. If you move too quickly while sick, you'll lose health. The Texan has road rage and will occasionally go crazy and start smashing into things all over the screen. This includes you and the rest of your team. The sidekick has narcolepsy and will randomly just fall asleep and you have to defend him from enemies in the most stupid escort mission ever. Finally, the female mechanic (and healer of the group) is afraid of heights and will just fly off the screen at random times in the game. All of these are very frustrating and add a very unenjoyable element to the game. Rather than adding more difficulty or acting as a set piece to break up the repetitive action, they just serve to act as more of an annoyance than anything. They are predetermined by level, but there is one in EVERY level, so it's something you're constantly dealing with. According the peanut gallery of the internet, this is one of the most voiced complaints of the game... and with good reason.
To help with the blankets of enemy bullets and large hitbox of your squad, you're given a lot of lives, health, healing, bombs, and other tricks for staying alive. This is all imperative because your squad is so huge and there is often no possible way to avoid damage. A lot of the boss levels are poorly designed as well with little strategy and most of the screen being kill zones (I'm looking at you scorpion boss). This annoyance is lessened by the cool design of the boss' visuals. At least you have something nice to look at while you're on the verge of rage quitting. To overcome the poor design, you're supposed to grind the other levels to upgrade your squad and overpower the enemy. Grinding these levels and upgrades is made more unfun because of the somewhat frequent and long load times. Playing the same level over and over with boring patterns is hard enough, but constantly having to wait between every try is excessive.
So, what's good about this game? Upgrading your squad is fun and unlocking new abilities makes the game more enjoyable. It's nice to get overpowered and plow through everything. It certainly reeks of the mobile game dopamine rush you get from constantly locking new items and abilities. Also, the sound design of the game is fantastic. Everything is recorded and mixed extremely well. The music isn't very good or memorable, but it sounds amazing. At times it even has an epic flair that wouldn't be out of place in a big budget movie. The sound effects are good and punchy as well. I also like the concept of the game with the surprise Nazi attack. As I mentioned earlier, the game does feel cheap in its presentation... but it does have a sort of charm that is endearing.
This version of the game also has DLC included on disc called Nebelgeschwader where you can play as the... Nazis. That was a bold decision. Hopefully, they become traitors and turn over to the other side at some point during the game. I'm curious to know, but I don't want to put any more time into the game because the gameplay is so repetitive and a grind fest. I did spend about a half hour with it. While it was a more interesting group of characters, it seemed like a lot more of the same. It was time to move on.
I was able to beat the standard game in Normal mode with about half my time spent grinding for upgrades. The platinum trophy in this game seems very doable, but after too many hours spent with the game... and only being about 25% of the way to hitting all the trophies, I couldn't even fathom playing any more. You can really tell that this is basically a smartphone game through and through. The grindiness, lazy design, and budget forward look of this game are all huge turn offs and the clunky gameplay doesn't do much to help it. It's just very mediocre not only as a shmup, but as a game in general. I can't say that I would recommend this one to very many people.
Final Status: Beaten
Final Score: 5/10
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