Aces of the Luftwaffe – Squadron is an action-packed, vertically scrolling shoot ‘em that is far better than it has any right to be. I initially sat down to spend an hour or so with the game to get a feel for it before really diving into it in earnest, but when I looked up at my clock after playing for a bit I realized I was hours into the game and it was 4am.
The game doesn’t push the SHMUP genre forward but there is so much care given to the content presented that you’ll be hard-pressed to not have a fantastic time with the game, even if you aren’t a fan of the shoot ’em-up genre. This isn’t a game that is going to tax shooter veterans very much, but it’s a solid experience that you’ll find hard to put down.
On the surface Aces of the Luftwaffe – Squadron is a shooter that keeps things pretty basic. Your goal in the games many stages –each set of stages broken up into 5 chapters– is simply to get to the end without dying. This is par for the course, but it’s what the games adds to that process that makes things interesting.
Each stage has a side mission that you’ll be tasked with completing. Maybe you’ll have to defend a support plane, maybe you’ll have to rescue POWs, maybe you’ll be tasked will killing certain enemies or with just surviving in the harder stages. These add a lot to the experience and mix up what tends to be a straightforward affair.
Gameplay also mixes things up from the traditional SHMUP sort of thing. You aren’t in this fight against the Nazi menace all alone, instead you fly with a squadron that actively help you in taking them down. You have three wingmen, each with a unique plane and abilities.
Your team surrounds you and when you fire your weapons they fire their weapons as well. What’s more, they each have their own life bars which means they can be taken down along with you. This means that you’ll have to not only pay attention to your hit-box, but also those of your teammates.
This sounds like it gets messy, and it does at times, but your wingmen aren’t dead forever as they will respawn after death after a short period of time. And since they are expendable without worry you can use them as human shields against enemies.
But while this does work, you have to balance that against losing their firepower when not with you. And since each wingman has a tech-tree that you can upgrade, making them more powerful and giving them special abilities via collecting upgrade gems in each mission, there is a strategy element not usually seen in this type of game.
On top of that you’ll have the chance to earn random loot drops from the games bosses. These bosses are a lot of fun and beating them can earn you new blueprints which unlock new aircraft with their own abilities. Aces of the Luftwaffe – Squadron has a lot going on!
Before each mission you have the ability to upgrade yourself and your wingmen, as well as set your fighter layout. EAch wingman has their own plane, but you can swap them out for any plane you’ve unlocked. There also isn’t a limit, so if you want all four pilots of have the small, powerfull fighter jet, they can.
This is important as there will be stages where setting the right squadron is essential to success. Sometimes you’ll want your craft to be small, maneuverable, yet but powerful, while giving two of your wingmen slower, stronger planes and maybe your third a plane with different weapons arcs.
Aces of the Luftwaffe – Squadron isn’t a hard game for those that play SHUMPs on the regular, but offers enough of a challenge in the end-game stages. Those looking for just a fun game will love this as the difficulty curve feels just right. I maybe it through most of the game without any upgrades (I didn’t realize I could at the time), but once I upgraded my squad the harder stages felt a lot more fair.
There is a lot going on here but you’ll also get to use all sorts of crazy powerups that drop during each stage. You can grab more powerful weapons that can stack if you pick multiple of the same ones up. From rockets to lasers and everything in between. Stuff is always happening and there is never a break in the action, other than the one stealth mission. Although you can just blast your way through it if you want.
Storywise I was really surprised by Aces of the Luftwaffe – Squadron. These sorts of games usually skip the story or just say that you need to kill the army of bad dudes. Nazi’s make for the perfect villains, but the game uses an alternate history to not make this a dark and gritty shooter.
At the end of the war the Nazi’s airforce invades the United States with all sorts of crazy flying contraptions. Your squad is all that’s left and you must take down the baddies and save the country. What’s really fun is that the game is fully voiced and each character is hilarious; hilariously bad.
I mean this as a positive. Each American pilot is voiced by a European with no American accent whatsoever. It’s so funny to hear their lines and how hard they are trying to put on some sore of American accent. The writing is also very strange and feels translated into English.
How your characters speak feels off in English in terms of structure. There are also a few grammatical errors that pop up in menus. None of this actually hurts the game though, as Aces of the Luftwaffe – Squadron tries hard to play as more a comedy.
The art style really helps with this, using a very cartoon style for everything. Planes on both sides look really good and are all unique and distinct. And while the game looks 2D, it’s a 3D affair with each plane being modeled, giving some nice depth when they bank about.
Aces of the Luftwaffe – Squadron is a surprising bit of fun that deserves to be in you Nintendo Switch library. That said, it’s not perfect outing with some notable issues that keep it from being great. As I noted before, the game offers a lot, but it does not push the SHMUP genre forward in any meaningful way.
What quickly became a chore were the problems that plague your wingmen. Sometimes a status effect will hit one of them that you’ll have to deal with. Maybe one will come down with a fear of heights and fly away, perhaps one will get really angry and start shooting down everything, including you, and maybe another will fall asleep and require you to shield them.
And then there’s your main pilot that gets randomly poisoned forcing you to fly slow take extra damage until it passes. At first these status-effects are a nice change from the norm, but as the game ups the challenge they simply feel like a chore that holds the experience back from being more fun.
There are also some technical issues that plague the experience. There was one time while playing that it froze during a load screen, forcing me to reset the game. And then there’s the wingmen themselves. In later levels there simply is too much going on to keep up with everything. It’s far too easy to get lost and lose track of what’s going on.
In these harder stages there isn’t any way to figure out bullet patterns to get you all through unscathed. And if you all have different planes, each will move at different speeds. This means they will trail you and end up dead before they have a chance to even fire.
The end game levels of Aces of the Luftwaffe – Squadron feel like a bullet-hell shooter while 90% of the rest of the game feels like a fun, silly romp. None of these issues are enough to turn me away from the experience, but they do feel a bit frustrating, especially when you see something great in the core of the game.
Aces of the Luftwaffe – Squadron was an unexpected surprise and is still a blast to play even with a few nagging issues. At the end of the day this is a game I can easily recommend and is a lot more fun than it has any right to be.
Final Score:
3.5/5
*A copy was provided for review*
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