Saving progress in the dynamic campaigns is prohibited, so you need to be sure of a significant chunk of time before firing them up. Gaijin is clearly trying to build a serious online community (and the multiplayer modes, from versus to co-op, are seamlessly integrated) but it makes things a slog for offline-only players. Unlocking the game’s hundred flyable planes becomes an exercise in tiresome grind, as the points needed to buy them are few and far between in the campaign but plentiful in multiplayer. With a game of such size and scope, a few flaws are probably inevitable. And if the set missions get too dull, the mission editor lets you build your own, or fly in a dynamically evolving campaign where your strikes on airfields and enemy forces have knock-on consequences for the evolution of the war. There’s a decent selection of novelty tasks as well, whether you’re landing a biplane on a breakwater or pancaking a wounded fighter on a narrow city street. Objectives include intercepting bombers on a moonlit night as searchlights criss-cross in the skies around you, swooping low over the suburbs of Valletta in an Italian warplane or mounting a torpedo strike on the Japanese super-battleship Yamato. The narrative is strictly minimal - a few martial strains of Beethoven’s 7th, a cut-scene or two of planes in flight and some sombre narration from Stephen Fry over stock war footage - but it’s really only there to frame the high-tension mechanics of the flying, from ground attack missions to dogfights and dive-bombing runs. The historical campaigns in Birds of Steel let players fly a variety of missions as the American or Japanese, in battles from Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal.
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