A Visceral & Thrilling VR Combat Flight Sim

Gaijin Entertainment knew exactly what it was doing when it came up with the name Aces of Thunder.

Yes it very obviously references its own ubiquitous military mega-arena, but for flight sim fans of a certain vintage, there is a special reverence for what was later marketed as the Great Warplanes Series. These games, for those too young to have experienced them, were a DOS-era series that started with Red Baron and were quickly followed in the early 1990s by Aces of the Pacific and Aces Over Europe. My nostalgia goggles may be a little foggy, but I believe all three were exceptional. Of course, thirty years on, Aces of Thunder can never claim to be part of that great lineage, but just as Red Baron was arguably the greatest WWI flight sim of its day and its sequels were the twin masters of the WWII skies, I’m happy to report that Aces of Thunder continues in that same ancient tradition of being among the very best at what it sets out to do.

What Aces of Thunder is, very obviously, is a prop-era combat flight sim, designed for – but not exclusive to – VR. Where its sprawling stablemate War Thunder can reliably claim to feature every military fighting vehicle there has ever been (and quite a few that barely escaped the fevered imaginations of their inventors), Aces of Thunder focuses on bona fide World War classics; sadly just four from WWI – including the Fokker Dr.I, naturally – and 20 from the major powers of WWII, including the Mustang, Thunderbolt, Zero, Spitfire and Mosquito, plus equally iconic models from Germany, Japan and USSR that eschewed the enduringly cool naming convention of the western allies. Basically if you, like me, remember life before video games existed, these are all the planes you had dangling from your bedroom ceiling.

If you wanted to be cynical about Aces of Thunder, you could point out with some self-serving justification that the game is merely an abbreviated version of War Thunder, using more or less the same engine and considerably fewer assets. However, there are two very important distinctions between the two games. One is that while Aces of Thunder’s selection of aircraft is limited to a handful compared to War Thunder’s many hundreds, all of them are accessible from the get-go, with the cost of access being a very reasonable old school price of $30 (or $50 for the Deluxe Edition with five extra warbirds). There is no tedious grind to unlock obscure stopgap aircraft or unnecessary fittings, you simply pick a plane and take to the sky. As rudimentary as that sounds, it’s remarkably liberating and intuitive.

The other difference is just how integral VR is to Aces of Thunder. That may seem an obvious thing to point out, but with a flatscreen version that offers crossplay, Gaijin could so easily have undermined its own efforts by including a superfluous or seemingly harmless HUD element or camera view that favored one group of players over another. Take War Thunder; it has perfectly serviceable VR functionality, sure, but it’s not in the slightest bit necessary or helpful. Here though your only view is from the cockpit. There are no third-person views or chase cameras, no floating icons or voiceover cues to suggest your plane is about to spectacularly break apart, or indeed hardly anything that would constitute any element of a gaming HUD – aside from a map that sits on your lap and I really had to lean into to get anything from. In short, all your feedback about your mission, the state of your aircraft and any potential threats all must come from the timely and judicious use of your Mk 1 eyes and ears. The challenge of the game and why it is so compulsively immersive is because, yes, you have to master the controls, but simultaneous to that is the need to be as aware of what your cockpit instrumentation is telling you as much as the creaking of the airframe or a violently oscillating wing before it snaps off and sends you spinning into the briny below.

As well as multiplayer battles that are Gaijin’s stock-in-trade – and which we’ll get to shortly – Aces of Thunder offers a generous selection of solo encounters. There are 14 single-player missions and nine so-called War Stories. Functionally there’s no difference between the two, save the fact that the former can be attempted in any order and are not based on any particular historical encounter. War Stories meanwhile run through the truncated highlights of WWII, from patrolling the White Cliffs of Dover and the seas around Pearl Harbor, to supporting efforts over Normandy and Iwo Jima. There’s no real thread between the missions and many can be completed just by turning up and following the waypoints, which, contrary to what you might think, makes them more replayable than they have any right to be.

The Mission Editor is the real star of the single-player show, partly because it’s a proper throwback to the combat flight sims of old. Here you can select a theater relevant to the plane you have selected, a sector of the map where the action is to happen and how the front line is arranged, then pick the type of engagement you want, the weather, time of day and the skill level you wish to fly with. Admittedly there’s not the compulsion of a properly orchestrated narrative campaign, but if you just want a quick sortie over enemy skies, or to brush up on your ground attack skills against a competent and scalable AI, the options are plentiful.

As you might expect, multiplayer battles play out in much the same way as War Thunder, although with a naturally smaller player population your choice of engagement is much more limited. You pick the aircraft you want to fly and the game will seek out an appropriate battle for you to join, with bots filling the skies in the absence of human pilots. If you want a more tailored experience, Custom Battles can be created and joined with much the same parameters as the single-player Mission Builder, with the added benefit that you can go hog wild and have Sopwith Camels battling over the Strait of Saipan. Naturally I got most of my flying time in before the game went live, so I didn’t get to experience how well the matchmaking held up, but given the developer’s 15-year experience with War Thunder and the many thousands that play it every day, it’s hard to imagine the server architecture being anything other than reliable.

I had only two issues with Aces of Thunder. The first is a natural consequence of enjoying what there is – which is to say I wanted more of everything – WWI planes and maps especially. But my main bugbear was the sparse and often unhelpful presentation away from the meat and potatoes of the main game. There really isn’t much assistance to speak of at all – no tooltips, no tutorial – and the game starts without fanfare and dumps you unceremoniously into the middle of a makeshift airfield, with only distant birdsong and some old gramophone dirge to stir you to action. That action in common with many VR games is to make your selections from an unconvincing clipboard that’s been surgically attached to your flying glove. The problem is that navigating the various menus with said glove is clumsy in the extreme. It’s like trying to operate a phone with a sausage. Sure you get used to it – because you have to – and if you just want to pick a plane and take to the skies you can just about accept the lack of a more precise pointer system, but for anything more than that – such as tweaking the graphical settings, or God forbid, reassigning controls to the various axes of your HOTAS and rudder setup, well, prepare yourself for an exercise in fist-shaking frustration. And don’t think it’s any easier reassigning controls in the flatscreen mode either, because it most definitely isn’t.

Thankfully, once you have the limited settings just how you like them and your controls have been similarly configured (which, by the way, work well if you avoid virtual stick options and go with your regular VR controllers or gamepad), Aces of Thunder becomes a consistently visceral and thrilling experience, where the term ‘flying by the seat of your pants’ has probably never felt more apt. On my modest PC that just about ticks all the boxes for the recommended spec, I found the visual fidelity and graphical performance to be excellent throughout, with the obvious caveats of pop-up at manageable distances and the odd realignment of foliage as you pass over treetops, but not enough to detract from the game in any meaningful way. I thought the Eastern Front maps to be rather drab, with textures that look like they’ve been extracted from a ’90s Quake mod, and many of the buildings leave a lot to be desired, but that’s as much a feature of them being shipped in from War Thunder. The proper detail is in the aircraft and how they handle and this is where the game shines, especially when tracers are flying and parts of someone’s wing are pinging past your cockpit. It serves to highlight how wonderfully immersive the game is once you’ve acclimatized to the bare bones presentation and the curtailed features necessary to maintain a level VR playing field.

Put simply, despite lacking in approachability and customization features, Aces of Thunder offers one of the most thrilling venues for combat VR gaming has to offer and is a fitting callback to the classic flight sims of yesteryear.

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