Developer: Wayward Design Publisher: Hasbro Interactive, MicroProse Division
Reviewed by Cat91 on 01/12/01

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First Impressions:

Graphics:

As you remember, the early screenshots were looking pretty stylin' indeed. According to documents posted on the major fan web site by lead developer Iain Howe, the graphics engine uses a new technique for flight simulation. Called procedural fractal rendering, the technology generates terrain images on the fly rather than using pre-rendered and textured bitmaps as most other simulations do. The team has been able to produce terrain that fools the eye by looking three-dimensional even at low altitudes, as if there were trees lining the roads and towns composed of actual buildings. The clouds are bump-mapped as well, and also trick the eye into thinking it is seeing large, three-dimensional clouds. The effect is well done.

I first booted up B-17 II after a flight back from Washington, DC, and with the images from my window seat fresh in my mind, I can say that Wayward has mostly achieved the feeling of being aloft in a large aircraft. The downside to the method the team chose is that every time one changes views, the terrain must be freshly generated. If one thumb-hats around the bomber's cockpit in the action views (I'll describe how that works below) for example, the game freezes for a split-second while the terrain and clouds fill in. Though the install options include a graphics cache, these aspects are apparently not stored therein. This causes the gamer to have to suspend her suspension of disbelief while the world fills back in, every time she changes views. In all honesty, however, I found this a minor annoyance, and worth trading off for the beauty of the terrain. Some gamers will have problems with the cloud generation. First, there are a lot of clouds all the time. Apparently, in Europe there is perpetual three-quarter cloud cover at about 8000 feet. This makes eyeball navigation dicey and bombing tricky, but interesting and fun. We'll visit that too, in a moment. The clouds themselves are flat, as in Digital Image Design's old game Total Air War. They are volumetric in the same fashion as TAW, meaning that as you descend or gain altitude toward them, you are suddenly enveloped in clouds and your visibility drops accordingly. TAW is one of my favorite games; I can live with that trade-off too. However, if you're into puffy clouds, they ain't here.

There are plenty of three-dimensional buildings in Occupied France, Germany and England, which are the limits of your in-game map. After all, this is a simulation of the European strategic daylight bombing campaign! Iain Howe claimed that the 3D buildings would almost merge in with the procedurally generated terrain. Though it isn't quite that good, the effect is nonetheless striking and well done, among the best in modern sims. The aircraft models are very well detailed, and all are accessible and flyable by the player. Besides the strategic bomber, fighters such as the P-51 Mustang, P-47 Thunderbolt, P-38 Lightning, and German Bf-109 and FW-190 fighters are present. Unlike the bomber, these have conventional 3D rendered cockpits and look very nice inside. These cockpits for the fighters are not clickable, however, and the thumb-hat pan view has to be accessed by a cumbersome Shift-P key every time one enters the fighter. Further, there is no viewer aid, such as the cone from Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator or the arrows in Jane's WWII Fighters, to aid in fighter combat. One thing I did notice: I strafed a road in a P-47 just for funsies and watched the bullets kick up dust. Early screenshots from Wayward showed them carrying bombs, and it is obvious that the developer intended for the fighters to be more than they are. That it wasn't to be is really too bad. I like the explosion effects, too. Two thumbs up for those. I also love the smoke effects, both with streaming contrails and blowing smoke from damaged engines. Damage effects are sharp. Engines explode into flame when shrapnel hits just so, and carbonize the wing and cowling. It's awesome to behold. Flak punches holes in the airframe you can see through. It feels like war when the flak starts.

One note: Don't believe Hasbro's line that the game will go on a lowball machine. I've got a Thunderbird 900 with a pretty decent GeForce DDR graphics card, and I cannot run the game at full detail in graphics, or it will freeze and lock up every time. If you're on less than a 900 MHz machine, turn down the graphics. Way down. They're scalable. There are significant stability issues, graphics-wise. It unpredictably freezes and/or crashes to desktop when the CPU is under heavy load, such as in combat, while loading graphics when you switch views. Mr. Howe has indicated that a patch is in the works to address at least some of these graphics-related issues.

Sound/Music:

The interface music is rather depressing. I'd expected Glenn Miller. Overall, the in-game sounds aren't bad, with one exception: the .50 caliber machine guns. I've HEARD Ma Deuce speak. She ain't that anemic. I believe they may be taking into account the headphones and earmuffs the crew would be wearing against the cold. The engines of the bomber in particular drone on like the real thing: it's a Zen experience on a long flight. Explosions sound good

Gameplay:

The heart of a combat sim. The first thing the player will notice is the pace of this game. Unlike tactical fighter sims and combat helicopter sims, this game is very slow-paced, reflecting the nature of combat in the prop-driven world. Like war in real time, B-17 II is long stretches of quiet flight over pretty country, punctuated by moments of sheer terror when attacked by evil Nazi fighters or hammered by yet more evil Nazi flak. As B-17 II appears to have history as one of its main motives, this is a good feature. It captures the feel of the times rather well. All ten crew positions in the B-17G bomber are modeled. The bombardier in the nose has both a gun turret and his Norden bombsight to deal with. The navigator has a drift meter (to help set up the bombsight) and an interactive map. The five gunners all have detailed guns that replicate view limitations of the actual B-17. It is the flight deck, home of pilot and co-pilot, that will ironically go down in history as the least well-done part of the bomber; I'll get back to that in a sec - you need to know something about the view system first. This is not done in 3D. The crew views are clumsy to access, requiring use of keyboard command or pop-up toolbar to go from position to position, then use of another command or toolbar to get to various views within the position. These views include an "action" view where you're seeing the game world through the eyes of the character in that position, an "instrument" view where you see and work with 2D (except for the map) instruments specific to that position (navigator's maps, bombardier's controls and sight, pilot instruments, and so on), a "compartment" view where you see a 2D view of the compartment you're interested in (there are five), an external view icon to take you to the outside of the bomber, and a "window" view that only works for the navigator, to get the airline passenger view.

Back to the flight deck. The "action" view, where you see the world through pilot or co-pilot's eyes, has no working instrument view. To get there, one has to go to the special instrument view via the toolbar. If there is a keyboard shortcut for this, I haven't found it yet. That is very cumbersome, and has been done better in almost every other flight sim. A fully-rendered, 3D, clickable cockpit similar to Jane's F/A-18, a 3D instruments view like Total Air War or Razorworks' Enemy Engaged: Comanche v. Hokum, or a switchable 2D with working quarter views/3D pan combat views system similar to Falcon 4.0 would do this sim immeasurable good from the pilot standpoint. Also, all the compartment views are isometric, and the gamer cannot pan the compartment. This detracts from immersion, and again this aspect of the game would have benefited from a 3D-rendered interior. In addition, many gamers are panning the game for lack of delivery on hardcore realism details that were promised, such as full engine management, similar to sims such as Terminal Reality's Fly! series.

These things aside, there's a lot here for both hardcore and softcore gamers in the game play department. The Norden bombsight is very well done, and one or two trips through the bomb run will make one understand why one F-16 can do the work of a whole squadron of B-17s in World War II. It's unforgiving to the novice, and hard to master. It also can be very accurate in level bombing from altitudes as high as 30,000 feet, if it is set up properly. You set it up by going into its "search" mode with Shift-K, locking it on your target with another Shift-K, and correcting it laterally and vertically with your joystick. My trick is to get in the proper line using the lateral corrections, disengage the sight, and then wait until nearly the last minute to lock up the target again. The Norden flies the plane with the autopilot. Once you're at the right place in space, the bombs are dropped automatically. These, by the way, are well rendered and you can see all sorts of detail on the bombs. You can watch them impact the target, drop from the bomb bay, and with what I call the StrangeloveCam watch 'em go down from the bomb bay itself. Mucho mayhem. Navigation has modes to select from hard to flawless, but beware: use of the game's time-skip feature (Which is a must: these are long missions. Just press your "enter" key) will get even your "flawless" navigator hopelessly lost. Then you must intervene. Look at where you are from the exterior of the B-17, looking down from overhead. Go to the navigator's map, and find terrain features that look the same. Switch to manual mode with the "M" key, and move the moving green airplane on the map to that feature. You're found again!

You're the "ghost in the machine" here. You can hop, skip, and jump to each position and do everyone's job. Or you can just watch the AI in action. Or you can be anyone you wanna be. You're managing the crew, and over a 25 mission (in the historical single-bomber campaign) campaign you get to know your crew's foibles. Like Atomic Games' Close Combat series, all have personalities. They can break under fire, get hurt and get better at their jobs. Over the Brest U-Boat base once, the sky filled with flak (see the screenshots!). One close burst riddled a wing with shrapnel holes - you can see through them - and you could hear the pilot cry out as the hit wrenched control from him for an instant. Then a burst close inboard put holes in the cabin near my radio operator. I heard him call out, but I was bombardier and on the bomb run: I was busy. After the bombs released and the pilot took over, I switched to the flight deck to get the co-pilot (this is when I found out about one graphics glitch. Often when one clicks on crewmembers, they disappear. Vanish, Poof! They're still there, but you can't see them or click on them. There's another toolbar at the top where you can find crewmen if that happens). Clicking on the co-pilot's toolbar icon, I directed him by way of his pop-up icon rose to get back to the radio operator and patch him up. Result: he lived to fly again. In the full Squadron Campaign you can do it with six planes at a time in a squadron of twelve; I play it like Close Combat. Note this: when you drop bombs, only your plane drops. The others don't. I assume this is so you can see what you hit. In real life the whole formation would drop when you, as formation leader, dropped. Target damage is probably calculated by taking the other aircraft into account. It is very similar to a tactical fighter sim in one respect: all the systems you're used to are here, but instead of being computer-driven they're driven by AI humans. AI bombardier and manual bombing rather than CCIP/CCRP modes, but the same ability to set ripple modes (they call it salvo/train) and timing. AI pilots rather than autopilot. An AI navigator rather than HSI/TACAN navigation. World War II was labor-intensive, and today we should remember what our grandparents and great-grandparents sacrificed back then: B-17 II helps us do so.

Enjoyment:

Once one gets used to the clumsy interface, this is a lot of fun. Good graphics, despite some glitches, and innovative design. The best crew AI of any sim I've flown; the crew can be set to have initiative and actually DO their jobs. I recommend the experience.

Multiplayer:

N/A

Overall Impression:

I felt this game was pushed to market far too early. It has been in development for an extended period, however, Wayward would have benefited from another six months of work. There is no multiplayer feature in the release, which will impact sales negatively, and there are too many graphics engine and overall stability issues for a final release. I experience a major freeze or hard crash about every fourth mission when the CPU is under heavy load, and that's with a fresh OS installation, the very latest version of DirectX and all drivers, and no overclocking. The interiors, particularly the flight deck, are poorly designed for a flight simulation, and the fighters feel unfinished, particularly in the flight models, and have no user accessibility features to take up the slack for the confines of a monitor, as other prop sims have. The P-38, for example, has no gunsight textures (this is an upcoming patch issue). It is apparent that the majority of the work went into other areas such as crew AI and graphics design, and those were very well done. The campaigns reflect history. Especially in the squadron campaign, the user has a great deal of flexibility and control of everything from crew composition to bomb load-outs. These issues aside, this one is a whole lot of fun for the single player. It is enjoyable to fly and I recommend it. It has something for everyone: high-fidelity modeling of the Norden bombsight, piloting at least as good as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000, arcade shooting from the gunner positions, crew interaction, and strategic planning. It's the total package once its limitations are taken into account.

Marketing Efforts Towards Women:

Totally non-existent. I tried for two months to get an evaluation copy from Hasbro Interactive, as had been sent out to other gaming sites, and even with the assistance of the lead developer I had no success. Once Mr. Howe got involved I finally got one response to my e-mails from Hasbro UK, but nothing more. After the hot reception I got on the forums of the major fan site for this title after my October preview (it instantly degenerated into a debate on why women have no business in combat aircraft, and by extension shouldn't fly combat sims, despite site staff attempts to welcome me aboard), I'm not surprised. On the surface, women gamers will find this title inaccessible. After all, there were no women in the 8th Air Force in World War II. The only air force that was progressive back then was the Soviet VVS. There is an abundance of cheesecake pictures, stemming from their use on the bombers in nose art at that time. Once you get past that, however (and to their credit, the developers added a selection of non-cheesecake nose-art for the rest of us), and into the substance of the game, it becomes a non-issue. Don't let that put you off. Give it a go, as my British friends say. Remember that women did ferry these birds from the U.S. to England, and like Close Combat, it is a good historical representation of what went on back in those days. This title is too good to pass up, despite its warts (there's a patch in development to address a lot of those), and despite its indifferent marketing. It's worth that Grant portrait in your purse or wallet.