Now Playing: Project Wingman

I quite enjoyed Ace Combat 7, but I was a little disappointed by the lack of any official VR support. Enter Project Wingman, a shameless Ace Combat clone that can also be played entirely in VR. And in VR was how I’d intended to play and review Project Wingman. Unfortunately, the VR support isn’t particularly good and I ended up playing the vast majority of the game out of VR.

Project Wingman is like a low budget love letter to Ace Combat and I can’t help but admire it for that. But whilst PW does a decent job of emulating Ace Combat and providing a familiar and enjoyable experience it’s, well . . . just not as good.

Project Wingman features a story based campaign of 21 missions. The story provides the adequate context you need, but the campaign missions lack variety in terms of objectives and are rather inconsistent in terms of difficulty – some are an absolute breeze, but others are annoyingly tricky. And some missions drag on for way too long as you’re faced with multiple waves of enemies (and no mid-mission checkpoints).

Some of the missions feature aircraft ‘boss’ fights, but these are where the game gets pretty tedious because you might be faced with 8 ‘elite’ aircraft at once and you’re constantly being targeted. All you’ll hear is the urgent, rapid beeping of the incoming missile alert system as you slowly whittle down the opposition health bars – primarily with your gun, because your own missiles are largely ineffective.

The campaign, whilst overall pretty fun, does have its share of problems beyond just the lack of mission variety and the inconsistent difficulty. The aircraft selection isn’t great, nor is the weapon selection. There’s also way too much dialogue during missions. In one mission the characters never stopped speaking resulting in me yelling at the screen for them to shut the f**k up. You can’t really pay attention to what’s being said and some of the VA, to be frank, isn’t all that good. It becomes more of an annoying distraction.

Visually, Project Wingman is a little rough around the edges. It’s what you’d expect from a low budget Ace Combat clone. It’s not great but it’s not bad. It does the job. The music is pretty decent but, once again, not as good as in AC. And I guess that kind of sums up PW as a whole – it’s like Ace Combat but just not as good.

Once you complete the campaign there’s an additional mode called ‘Conquest’. I thought this might be some kind of strategy-lite mode in which you claim territory on a map, and each territory offers a different terrain, enemy types and objectives. And it sort of is like that, but it’s also, unfortunately, a rogue-like, which means that if you die during a mission, everything resets.

You can keep any credits / points you earn to unlock new aircraft, but the next time you play, you’ll need to start back at square one. It’s . . . really not that fun when your progress keeps getting reset. I know some people like that kind of thing, but I’m not sure it’s the right choice for this kind of game. I’d have preferred a more straightforward ‘conquer the map’ type mode free of any story in which I can progress at my own pace and unlock new aircraft and weapons as I go.

So what about the VR support? As I said, it’s not good. The performance is a real problem. Some missions are . . . acceptable, at best. Others are practically unplayable. But even if the performance was perfect there are other, rather glaring issues, the worst of which is the UI.

No attempt was made to redesign the menus or UI for VR and they’re f**king terrible. They’re a pain to navigate and hard to read. Trying to select aircraft and weapon slots has you instinctively leaning forward, trying to squint at what you’re looking at because everything is so small and fuzzy.

The cockpit UI isn’t much better as subtitles (I’d recommend turning them off) and other mission specific text floats on the periphery of your vision making it hard to read and also blocking your view. The core targeting UI also floats awkwardly in your face, clipping through the entire cockpit, making it hard to see exactly what you’re aiming at. You can increase the text size of targets and other UI elements, but this just clutters your screen even more, making it even harder to see what the f**k is going on.

VR support in Project Wingman is a bit of a mess but there are moments when it really does blow you away. The feeling of speed as you race low across an ocean. The rain streaking across your cockpit in a storm. Banking hard into a massive dogfight between dozens of aircraft, missile trails criss-crossing the sky . . . there are moments when PW is absolutely glorious in VR but only moments.

It’s those moments of greatness that I wanted for the entire game but sadly, fleeting moments is all we get. If the performance issues are fixed (and frankly, PW does not look good enough to suffer these kind of problems) and the UI completely redesigned, then PW is a game that I will happily play again, entirely in VR.

But until then, the VR support just isn’t good enough, and although the game out of VR is still fun, it’s just not as good as Ace Combat. So if you’re looking for a game like this and you don’t have / care about VR, then AC7 is the game I’d recommend. And if you do have VR and want an AC style VR experience, this may be the best you’ll get, but that doesn’t make it good.

6/10