I’ve been playing flight sims almost as long as I can remember. Falcon AT, Heroes of the 357th, Top Gun and Megafortress were all early favourites. Even if I wasn’t quite old enough to master the sophistication, just tooling brought hours of enjoyment. They bring out a certain nostalgia, even now.
By the turn of the millennium, I had started to move away from flight sims. Il-2 Sturomvik in 2001 pulled me back in to some extent, but I was by that was a fighter-focused game and I would drop out of it before it came to its final incarnation as Il-2 1946. The intricacies of combat flight sims just weren’t where my teenage brain was at. (Battlefield 1942’s release in 2002 would give me just enough to enjoy, but the arcade feel was all I needed.)
Then 2020 came along and it was time to really dig back into video games. More than just a couple big console titles, it was time to cast a wider net. So, eventually, I stumbled on Digital Combat Simulator.
An inexpensive Logitech 3D Pro quickly got pushed aside for a more modern and sophisticated joystick, and eventually throttle. Then came head tracking, through the phone-based Smoothtrack (which I cannot recommend enough).
Dipping a toe quickly turned into a dive into the abyss.
A good timing
So when B-17 Flying Fortress: The Mighty 8th Redux dropped into early access right around the time the latest Tom Hanks-Steven Spielberg Second World War miniseries, Masters of the Air, was released, I was ready for it.
The Mighty 8th was a 2000 release, following the exploits of the Eighth Air Force. This was the United States’ strategic bomber group that would fly mostly daylight bombing raids primarily across northern Europe.
If you’ve seen Masters of the Air, you’re familiar with the 8th. The show follows the war through the 100th bomb group, one of the squadrons under the 8th.
My issues with the game come mostly from unfamiliarity. What makes a modern sim accessible are clear, immersive training missions. Understanding how these aircraft work is no easy task. There are plenty of systems to deal with. Engine management, bombsights, navigation, aerial gunnery, these are all parts of the aircraft you’ve got to deal with.
That’s before you’re being bucked around by weather and flak, trying to get your bomb load off before falling out of the sky.
So at first, the training mission seems to do this, holding your hand as it takes you through your B-17, learning what different stations do, how to navigate between them, and other basics of the interface. But in the following tutorials, the hand holding goes away.
And, unfortunately, because the manual is also a work in progress, even the instructions for the training missions were a bit thin.
This is in many ways how the game is supposed to work. In an early Dev Blog, the team emphasizes that when you start out, you’re mostly along for the ride.
“For those of you who will be playing the Mighty 8th for the first time, you might feel overwhelmed at first. It’s a flight sim with a focus on crew management, so the developers needed to focus heavily on AI that can do a good enough job when you are focused on whatever you think needs attention at any given moment.”
So, part of the problem with this is me. I don’t want to leave it up to an AI and just manage emergencies as they come up. I want to learn all the bits inside and out. Ideally without having to have a YouTube clip on a second screen guiding me along.
And because I don’t have previous experience with the game, it’s all the more difficult.
Early access has been all about making incremental improvements on the original. Updating the graphics, smoothing out the function of the AI, knocking down bugs as they appear. All necessary things. Just last month, the team released a major update with a new 4k textured version of the Flying Fortress.
As the YouTube clips show, they’re making major progress:
But other gameplay aspects are still to come. The team’s work right now is focused on getting the core foundation up to a more modern spec, other improvements will arrive later.
Microprose’s rebirth as a viable brand, refocusing in large part on their flight sim past, is a fascinating development. The split focus on nostalgia titles like the Mighty 8th, and new-but-old-feeling efforts like Tiny Combat Arena makes for a well-rounded line up.
The best of remakes takes the soul of something and bring it in line with modern conventions and technology. They smooth out the rough edges, and take away the difficult or annoying bits, and reconstruct them into a fresh but familiar package.
Without nostalgia to lean on, the Mighty 8th is a hard sell for me at the moment. It definitely has the beginnings of polish, but it hasn’t made the full leap into the present.
I think there are good bones here, and the roadmap the team has laid out should bring the game further ahead, as they knock off more of the graphical and gameplay issues.
The team is doing great work, but if you’re new to the game, the learning curve is steep. Unless you’re really nostalgic for the original, I’d give it some time.
B-17 Flying Fortress: The Mighty 8th Redux
Developper / publisher: MicroProse Software
Platform: Windows (reviewd on Steam)
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