These are all beneficial points that help draw you into the game, but then you'll inevitably start noticing its problems. Despite many of the game's battles being known to historically involve many squadrons of planes and ground forces in reality, the game only portrays a relatively small number of forces in the conflict - and even then, the friendly AI isn't particularly fantastic and usually takes way too long to score any kills to be of use.

Additionally, it feels a lot harder to line up on enemy planes and actually score a kill than it does in other air combat games - though of course this could have more to do with the game's relatively accurate portray of handling for the fighters of that generation. And then of course there's the raw repetition of the gameplay. I find my feelings on this a bit surprising given my addiction to the Ace Combat series (which is the epitome of repetition when it comes to flying around lobbing missiles at targets), but I think that has more to do with the ridiculous, over-the-top situations those games constantly place you in. Interesting dialogue aside, Heroes Over Europe is 'just' about flying around shooting down German planes, which makes the whole experience feel a little lackluster.

What's most likely to make flight sim purists scream bloody murder, however, is the lack of a cockpit view; the entire game is third-person, and there isn't much flexibility for changing the camera view around. PC gamers will be further inconvenienced by the game's lackluster joystick support; at the time of this writing, the game still doesn't work properly with a number of popular joysticks on the market and a number of pre-release patches have been frantically put out by the developer to try and address this (check out the game's official forums if you want to track them down). Personally the game didn't give me too much grief with my Saitek X52 (which almost felt like overkill) until I restarted the game and noticed it had annoyingly forgotten all of my custom input bindings. Whoops.

That doesn't mean the game isn't at all fun; the characteristics for all the different planes that can be unlocked make it worth your time to give them all a workout. The game also throws spontaneous 'bonus objectives' your way, which increase the amount of content you can unlock after each mission. Finally, there's even a gimmicky 'focus' mode you can switch on by flying close behind an enemy pilot for a certain period of time and pushing a button when the appropriate gauge fills up. This puts you in a mode where you zoom in on an enemy aircraft and have to fight to move the crosshairs over marked points on their plane before time runs out. Pulling the trigger at the right time can either cripple an enemy or result in an 'ace kill' (where you take them down with a single burst of machinegun fire). It's a cool novelty that is incredibly rewarding any time you successfully pull it off, but in itself isn't enough to offset the game's other limitations.

There's no question that this game has its moments (there's even multiplayer, but it's mostly limited to team and non-team fragfests, with no co-op play involved), but there is still quite a lot of room for improvement before it could be considered a top-tier title - and the joystick issues definitely need resolving. If you're a PC gamer that is a bit intimidated by IL-2 Sturmovik and are sick of playing H.A.W.X., then Heroes Over Europe might be worth a look. If you're expecting it to completely fulfill your air combat needs though, you'll be disappointed.