Heroes over Europe

We will preface this review by saying that if you are looking for a complex, realistic flight simulator, then this game probably isn't quite what you are after.

Heroes over Europe offers two modes, Arcade and Professional, but neither feels particularly true to the experience of being behind the throttle of a military plane. Make no mistake, this game is all about the action.

Heroes over Europe is a direct sequel to the well-received 2005 game Heroes of the Pacific and gameplay is largely similar. As one of three different pilots you must take to the skies in a series of vintage aircraft and dogfight your way through 14 missions set in World War II and beyond.

On a fairly new PC, the plane models and environmental graphics should look very good. And, despite some embarrassing dialogue, the soundtrack is effective. Typical missions involve machine-gunning it out with enemy planes among the clouds, protecting or bombing specific targets and disabling ground-to-air defences.

For the first few levels this can be quite entertaining, but it soon becomes clear that Heroes over Europe has little else to offer.

There's a one-shot kill system that can be fun to pull off and a selection of different planes to unlock, but aircraft don't seem to handle all that differently to each other.

The relatively short single-player campaign suffers from being unimaginative and repetitious.

Online multiplayer is available but, overall, the plain fact is that there are plenty of other similar games out there that do a much better job than this.

PEGI age rating: 12+