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Dogfight 2, the best flash game

Control and Feel

For this review, the game was played on the PC using keyboard and mouse, although you are able to use your Xbox 360 controller. This is a good thing, as it’s quite simple to tell that this game was developed with a joypad in mind. The controls are very basic, it’s pretty much a point and shoot with the mouse, you can also use ‘a’ and ‘d’ on the keyboard to move the plane left and right without tilting the wings. At first using the mouse instead of a joypad seemed strange, and it’s hard to fly level or reach that ‘default middle’ as you would on a joypad.

Once you’ve got past this initial obstacle either by getting used to it or plugging in a joypad, you can start the campaign. You’ll have to kill many war planes during the each mission, which involves pressing e while hovering over an enemy to target it with ‘e’, this will give your enemy a special arrow on screen so you can differentiate it from the other enemies. When your targeted enemy is on screen it will have a crosshair near it, showing you exactly where you need to aim in order to hit the enemy with machine gun fire. Some will like this feature, others may find it takes the fun out of the game and turns it into a point and click game. This is always the problem when making a game originally designed for the Xbox and PS3 available to the PC. For example, there is a feature where the camera rotates around your plane to allow you to see your targeted enemy, so you can position yourself with them in mind. This is fine if you’re using a joypad, you just adjust the plane little by little, returning to that ‘default middle’ after adjustments, but it doesn’t work like that with a mouse, so this feature is pretty much useless, you’ll just have to turn to face your enemies to keep them on screen, using the on screen arrows.

Dogfight 2, a flying and shooter game available on the PC, PSN, and Xbox provides aerial dogfights and fighter missions set during WWII. You will be fighting against Japanese bombers and various other war planes of the period throughout the campaign. You can fly over 40 realistic war planes in various different game modes including dogfight 2 (head to head), co-operative, and survival (fight countless enemies with a friend).

General Thoughts

Overall I don’t think the game brings anything new to the table, the missions are quite repetitive, fly around, shoot enemies, mission completed. In regards to customisability the game has done well, you can choose from a few different designs to go in various spots on your plane, changing camo etc. The variety of planes is also very good, and they look pretty accurate and realistic, in fact the whole game does. The visuals are nicely polished and everything looks good. There is an interesting kill cam feature that occasionally activates after a kill, it looks great and is quite fun to watch, but this could take away from the flow of the game. The voice acting is mostly good, but could be improved here and there with a few characters sounding unauthentic; some lack enthusiasm and others have too much.

In summary, the game has good visuals, average voice acting, somewhat repetitive gameplay (fun in short bursts but couldn’t play it for hours straight). The co-op game modes add to the game but full on multiplayer is missing, which is disappointing. If you’re going to play this game, get a joypad!