Fighter Squadron: The Screamin' Demons Over Europe

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Review: Fighter Squadron: The Screamin' Demons Over Europe

But alas, while it excels in a number of areas, Screamin' Demons falls flat in just as many.

Each of the four recent WWII flight sims shines in some way. Microprose's European Air War has massive campaigns, an authentic WWII feel, and huge aerial battles. Jane's WWII Fighters touts awesome graphics and special effects. Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator's most salient feature is that is does everything well, but doesn't do any one thing superbly.

Enter Screamin' Demons, which offers the most impressive physics model and realism of the bunch.

The game is more like a military combat simulator than a true "game." You can fly some 90 missions in three combat theaters--English Channel, German Rhineland, and North Africa--as an American, British, or German pilot. However, the pilot you fly as is generic. You don't play as one pilot but rather jump around among the aircraft in your flight, and you can choose to fly with a different squadron from mission to mission.

Moreover, the missions are not linked to create a grand campaign. You can fly them in any order you wish. Indeed, Screamin' Demon's is designed to give players a sense of what WWII combat felt like--not a sense of what it felt like to be a pilot in the war.

You get 10 aircraft to fly, which include such staples as the American P-51 "Mustang," British Spitfire, and German Me262 jet. However, in what is Screamin' Demon's coolest asset by far, you also get to pilot bombers, including the American B-17, British Lancaster, and German Ju-88, which none of the other games allow.

Better still, you can jump from position to position in the big birds, so you can switch from pilot to gunner when things get hot. And it's a blast firing away at bogeys from a B-17 ball turret as 20-millimeter shells whiz by your head.

The missions vary from garden-variety patrols to long-range bomber escorts and strikes. However, one theme remains constant: There are never many planes in the air. Battles typically feature three bombers with an escort of 2 to 5 fighters, against a similarly sized opposing force.

However, the lack of numbers does not mean combat isn't exhilarating. This is a white-knuckle game. Several times during dogfights I had to make myself relax my grip on the stick for fear I would break it.

Each plane has 20 to 40 "break points." If these are damaged, the plane will handle differently--and just about every part on the plane can get shot away. Try bringing home a Spitfire that's missing a third of its right wing! Explosions can also be spectacular, with multiple parts of a plane spinning off in different directions and fluttering in the wind as they fall to earth.

Yes, Screamin' D does combat well.

It's too bad the overall game feels unfinished. Screamin' Demons feels like a collection of different parts rather than a cohesive whole--something that could have been fixed with a true campaign system. The view system is cumbersome (and buggy), and it's easy to get disoriented when you jump from plane to plane in combat. The manual is also extremely meager for a flight sim. The music sounds like a collection of unused MechWarrior tracks. (How 'bout vintage '40s music to go with the vintage radio clips used in the game, folks?)

LAN and Internet multiplayer options (for up to eight) help, but you can't have multiple players in a single airplane (as pilot and gunner).

While it could have been much, much better, Screamin' Demons is a solid simulator that hardcore purists are sure to enjoy. Less fanatical flyers are probably better off with European Air War.-- Steve Klett / GamePro