Buy Wings! Remastered Edition

No because of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥t strafing missions. I'm constantly "Failing" these for using too many bullets? (uhh they are unlimited) or not hitting enough targets. Strafing missions should have simple minimum percentage to hit. No mission retry and poor mouse / keyboard controls. Bought the game for $2 as part of a bundle of others

Your friendly planes are still just a waste of space killing naff all and not even trying to defend when your out gunned.
Worth a couple of quid at most. Surely someone must come up with a better ww1/ww2 dogfighter game.

This game should have been left in the past

A FLAWED REMASTERING

I fondly remember playing Wings on my old Amiga some 20 years ago, spending MANY hours playing it over and over again. It was probably my favorite Amiga game ever. Although this remastering looks great graphically, it's incredibly flawed and not an exact copy of the original. It's still fun to play, but if you've ever played the original, you may be disappointed as I am.

GAME MECHANCS AND PRE-MISSION TEXT
My biggest problem with the game is that it totally ignores all the mission text you see right before you jump in to dogfight. I'm talking about the white narration text on a black background just before the mission starts. Numerous times it will read "We surprised them and came up on their tails" or "We spotted the enemy down below", but EVERY SINGLE TIME you start and the enemy are STRAIGHT ahead of you. Ever. Single. Time. Nothing changes. VERY lazy developers!

The original game actually followed this text and sometimes missions threw you in really bad starting positions where the enemy is on your tail or coming up from the side or something. With this version, EVERY mission starts out the same and it gets really boring after a while. My dogfight tactic of choice always is to point up to the sky, get as high as I can, then dive the enemy as they pass under me to attack the AI planes. It never fails and is just as predictable as the missions are.

YOU CAN NO LONGER LAND YOUR PLANE SAFELY
In the original game, sometimes your plane would take so much damage and you would have to force a landing. Sometimes you would crash into another plane and have to force a landing. Sometimes you walked away, other times you didn't. In this version everything is considered instant death, so when you crash that's it, no walking away.

THE REASON IT WAS CALLED "CINEMA"WARE
One of the things that was great about the original game was that if an enemy got on your tail, it would enter this "cinema mode" where all of a sudden it's like you're watching an old film and you're in 3rd person view behind the enemy plane chasing yours, allowing you to try to shake it off (which then put you back in 1st person view if you succeeded.) In this game that is totally gone, so if a plane does get behind you, you have to work a little harder to find where it is.

BOMBING RUNS
I am only half way through the game, so this may come up later, but in the original, if you were bombing an aerodrome and enemy planes managed to take off, you actually had to fight them as they flew down from the top of the screen. I have yet to see this happen in this version.

OVERALL
It is still fun, but the fact each dogfight mission starts out exactly the same is what kills this game for me. I miss the original version!

Cinemaware games back on the Amiga had a certain magic about them. When you clicked the disk into the drive and started to load you instantly knew you were in for something special. Wings was one of the real standouts, at the time, it was one-of-a-kind and interestingly I can still say the same 25 years later! WWI games continue to be rare.

A valid argument against Wings is that the gameplay is too simple, and yes, by modern gaming standards, the gameplay is rather basic more akin to a casual game. It is also rather easy so hardcore gamers might find limited enjoyment. The introduction of saving your progress every 5 missions could have been excluded in my view considering the overall difficulty.

That being said, it still has something many modern games often lack, and that is atmosphere & immersion. In Wings, this is created primarily by the ongoing story shared in the form of a (now spoken) diary, vividly putting you into the mind of a British WWI fighter pilot from snot-nosed rookie to seasoned ace. You get a strong sense of their fears & ongoing personal challenges as they patrol the front, and when you realise that the average life expectancy of a new pilot in WWI was only 11 days it really drives home the emotions those pilots must have had going up in fragile wooden bi-planes day in and day out on what must have seemed a never ending war.

Along with the 'humanising' components of the story, there is also a good dose of historical context (although somewhat one sided as you cannot play as a German pilot). Wings taught me more about the First World War & those pioneering fighter pilot days than any teacher did back in school!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=338614528 The gameplay itself is split into three distinct modes; Dogfighting, Strafing & Bombing. Strafing & Bombing levels are top down/isometric views of your plane giving you a specific target to destroy (generally only last a few mins each run). These add some variety, although the real fun is in the dogfighting mode.

In Dogfighting, it is more a simulator cockpit view (although it doesn't have the realism in controls to be considered a real simulator - check out Rise of Flight for a proper WWI sim). All of these modes feel very authentic to the original, although AI could have been improved for dogfighting. The real risk I have found, is not so much being shot down, but rather running into your wingmen or German pilots.

Again, this comes back to my earlier point about the game being too easy as once you learn how to avoid collisions survival (& success) is almost guaranteed. Destroying the Balloons missions particularly offer no challenge. I always remembered there being a good chance of being shot down by AA fire in the original, yet I can head directly to a balloon in the remake and always get the win.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=338614556 I am a bit torn in my view in one respect. While I really like the authentic re-creation, I would have also liked to seen more enhancements/improvements to counter the simplicity. To offer a harder challenge, keeping the soul of Wings but offer more variety. More work on different mission scenarios, improved plane controls (throttle?), different starting positions or altitudes (rather than always starting in front of you), better AI, even more randomness in plane destruction model or longer missions would have been welcome.

Despite the repetitive nature of the game, and the relative ease, Wings continues to be so much fun to play. My first session I couldn't put this down for over 6 hours! It is perhaps the best & most authentic Amiga remake I have played to date. The musical score is top notch (can even enable original score!), voice acting is exceptional & graphical improvements (although not what you would consider awesome!) honour the original feel while adding more visual detail.

Whether you are a fan of the original or never played Wings before, this is truly a classic game. It has good replayability (due to the several hundred missions & ongoing story) & accessible to casual gamers while also teaching you a bit about the horrific years of the First World War.


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The original Wings was a 1990 WW1 arcade action game for the Amiga. It was hailed by critics for its addictive gameplay and uniqueness, and some people consider it one of the top Amiga classics. An initial attempt by developers Cinemaware at funding a remake fell well short of a 350k goal on Kickstarter. The second rather less ambitious attempt which only asked for 85k crawled over the finishing line. It’s the first title released under the Cinemaware label in over ten years.

The game consists of three distinct arenas of gameplay which are interspersed by a text-based story presented from a first person perspective, in this version also with an audible narrator. The story is charming and, with the music, has a distinct WWI-era feel, but it’s hardly enthralling. The three types of gameplay are all arcade-like in nature, but are also quite distinct from each other.

The first, and more or less main, type of play is basically a 3D flight simulator in which you must destroy a small number of German planes, sometimes also being required to destroy a handful of Zeppelins. You’ve no radar so the first minute is spent panning the horizon to work out where the heck the enemy is, and after that it’s classic dog fight action. If you fire your guns for more than about three seconds they jam and you’re left toothless while you wait for them to start working again. Death can come brutally quickly, particularly if you make any kind of physical contact with another aircraft. There’s no doubt that taking down enemy planes is satisfying, particularly the way they crumple and explode.

The second segment is a section which involves strafing, the act of flying low with an aircraft and blasting targets with machine gun fire. This takes place in a top down 2D environment with your guns aimed at a fix spot about a third of a screen’s length in front of you. Your mission objectives vary between killing infantry, blowing up trains, blowing up trucks, destroying tents, and so on. Meanwhile, you’re expected to avoid hitting any red cross vans, and dodge the anti-aircraft and infantry firing at you, which really isn’t that difficult to do. Bizarrely, in this segment you are highly punished for wasted ammunition, if you don’t end with a decent percentage hit rate you are given a reprimand. Reprimands are given for miserable mission performance, three reprimands and you need to start a new pilot or go back to the last save point.

The third type of gameplay featured in the title is a bombing run. This also happens in a top down 2D arena, but this time your guns are aimed straight forward for fighting off opposing planes and you have a secondary fire which allows you to drop bombs. You are given a very limited number of bombs and at the start of the segment you are shown a picture of the target you need to destroy, normally a building. Using the shadow of your plane to judge, you need to correctly identify and bomb the target whilst avoiding anti-aircraft fire. Potential hazards include wasting your bombs on the wrong target or just missing it altogether.

These three sections are layered in a more or less random fashion in a level by level format. About every three levels your pilot is auto-saved so that if you die or accrue too many reprimands you can auto-reload to just a few levels previous. The difficulty of all three gradually increases throughout the game, in the 3D section, for example, the German planes slowly increase in number and skill level and your wingmen slowly decrease. Likewise, in the bombing sections there are more anti-aircraft weapons, enemy planes, and so on.

It certainly succeeds in presenting simple arcade action based entertainment, but it is also very simple; as you might expect from a 1990 Amiga title. Personally I didn’t find the game terribly compelling despite it being fun. It makes me wonder if this kind of gameplay is showing its age. The fact is you’re really doing very little, and yes it does require skill, but it’s very basic.

It’s difficult for me to definitively say how faithful a remake this is because I never played the original, but I’d hazard a guess that it’s pretty damn close. The major changes seem to be in terms of the graphics, music, and sounds. By all appearances, the gameplay is extremely similar. As a result, fans of the original could well appreciate the nostalgia of this release. As to whether the series will find itself a new fan base, I’d seriously doubt it.

It’s clear enough isn’t it, if you remember this Amiga classic and you’re well up for round two then maybe it’s worth picking up. It’s not a full priced release anyway and it seems that they’ve done a pretty good job of capturing the essence of the original but with a new lick of paint. However, for the people who are still wondering what the hell this actually is, I can’t really recommend it. As much as one can kick back for ten minutes playing Pac-Man just out of retro respect, let’s not pretend it still gets a look in against modern releases. Overall 6/10.

A faithful recreation of an all time classis.

If you enjoyed Wings! on the Amiga, you will not be disappointed.

I'm against giving good reviews to games only because of nostalgia. So I will try to give this game a note as it deserves, not because it's a new version of old-school classic, which I used to play a lot.
This is arcade simulator during WWI. There are 3 types of mission, but most of all you will fight with enemy planes in dogfight style.
It is true that missions are very repetitive, but I still have one more mission syndrome. So to be honest I don't even care that next mission is very similar to previous one, I just want to shoot down couple more enemy planes. The game is quite easy on the beginning but after some time, difficulty level grows up.
I feel the same fun, as I felt many years ago playing original title on Amiga.

VERDICT:
If you like arcade plane simulators, you should give it a chance.
If you're a fan of original Wings game, this is must have for you.
But if you're a fan of serious simulators, this is kinda far away of it.

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An absolute Amiga classic bought back to life!

As a teenager all the way back in 1990 , I used to play this game all the time and completed the entire war countless times. Now I get to enjoy it all over again, only this time with even more stunning visuals , orchestrated versions of the original music (although they've even included the original music as an option for all those who want to reminisce) , a fully voiced journal and control via XBox controller (no more clunky 2 button Joystick ).

A truly excellent remaster and highly recommended!!

Now all we need is a remaster of It Came from the Desert :)

What a cracking job the guys on this have done.
The atmosphere of the original has been perfectly preserved as well as the graphics not beng too over the top. RThis game was all about the gameplay and the fact you cared for your pilto.
This really deserves to sell well and be the catalyst for more classic games to be remastered. A shame the Bitmap Brothers ruined their version of The Chaos Engine.
Lets hope for more Cinemaware games to be given this treatment. I for one will be definitely buying them :)