This is your first impression of Destineer’s Spitfire Heroes: Tales of the Royal Air Force, and it speaks volumes. One can make it past this area with determination and a little trial-and-error, but there isn’t much incentive since the experience doesn’t improve from there. With frustrating gameplay and worse pop-up than the original SNES Star Fox, in Spitfire Heroes war is not hell - it’s just extremely boring and aggravating.
Controlling your plane is done with the D-Pad. The touch screen displays your plane’s “health” and radar, but isn’t used for much else besides graphical filler. Use care when easing up on the throttle, because you can stall and, predictably, explode. You can also move the throttle forward to boost (“Fox! Use the boost!”), but doing so decreases your turn radius. Unfortunately, the side effect of this is that you rarely see your attackers.
You can perform barrel-rolls (“Fox! Do a barrel roll!”), but they seem to have little effect besides exciting your pursuers. You’ll see red dots on your radar closing on your position, and soon shots begin to pummel your little fighter with virtually no warning. No amount of awkward dipping or listing lazily to the left can shake these enemy hot-shots, and barrel-rolling does nothing. Soon you’re blown out of the sky and gritting your teeth.
The R button fires your guns while the L button is used to activate auto-targeting, which does little besides making your plane’s movement imprecise and unpredictable. On one occasion the auto-targeting drove my apparently suicidal pilot directly into the path of an enemy fighter, causing a mid-air collision. It isn’t very helpful!
Spitfire Heroes’ gameplay can be confusing and annoying all at once. For example, on one occasion I destroyed all three fighters I was pitted against by bobbing, weaving, and holding down the fire button. I noticed six more tanks had spawned, and I destroyed them too. Mission over! I won! But I actually lost, because I took too long and died too often. I couldn’t recall one of my mission objectives being “don’t get shot down”, but apparently that’s what it took to win a battle back then.
From a graphical standpoint your plane looks great, but backgrounds are pixelated as are enemy tanks, fighters, and trees. Explosions are 2D, along with the “particle effects” of your gunfire. Landscapes are divided neatly into three colors: light blue for the sky, darker blue for the ocean, and green for the land, with a dash of light brown thrown in for sand.
The underpowered graphics engine also hampers gameplay; a later mission has you protecting an air base against seemingly hundreds of German bombers and their fighter plane escorts. This is an impossible task given the game’s limited draw distance, and this factor combined with pixelated object models makes firing with accuracy a shot in the dark, so to speak. Spitfire Heroes’ graphics are underwhelming, to say the least.
The sound is equally uninspiring. Aside from the roar of your engines and gunfire, there is no sound. No music, no real sound effects, no voiceovers, no nothing. DS gamers expect better, especially this far into the system’s lifespan.
Spitfire Heroes supports multi-card local wireless play, which isn’t likely to get much use besides commiserating with somebody else that happened to pick up the game. Your time would be much better spent elsewhere.
Pros:
Lastability: 1.0
There is better shovelware than this game. I don’t really know why you’re reading this review instead of playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
Final: 2.0
Spitfire Heroes: Tales of the Royal Air Force has frustrating gameplay, nearly non-existent sound and music, and poor graphics that make an already difficult game even harder. It has a useable control scheme, but that doesn’t save it from being a game that should never grace the screen of your Nintendo DS.
