It pays not to overcomplicate things sometimes. When you’re making the latest game in the Ace Combat series it can be understandable that you’d be inclined to try and come up with new gameplay and mission ideas, yet as a fan of said series, the missions which deviate most from the ‘just destroy everything’ mould are invariably the one’s I enjoy the least. Just give me a plane, hundreds of missiles, bombs and bullets and let’s get the Top Gun soundtrack going.
It also pays not to care about realism all that much either. There are certainly those that are into that sort of thing, Microsoft Flight Simulator exists for a good reason after all, but for those such as I, all you really want is the essential fun and excitement that comes with aerial combat, rather than it’s more complex reality.
Project Wingman is one such example of this loose adherence to the facts of sky warfare, and for its 20 campaign missions delivers the sort of full-on arcade action that leaves a real smile on my face. Missions are straightforward in design; the setting changes and the context shifts but the core is always the same; destroy everything, have fun. No forced stealth, no overly strict automatic mission failures, just you and a swarm of green icons that need removing with your flying whoosh sticks and dakka dakka pellets.
What passes for variety is typically in the different weather effects, obscuring visibility and upsetting movement in such a way as to give pause before chasing an enemy fighter into stormy clouds. More than once I made this error where one's only reward was a screen's worth of terra firma at the end. Otherwise it is your choice of jet that switches things up, often determined by the composition of air and ground targets outlined in the mission briefing.
You can certainly spot the love the developers have for the Ace Combat series, as missions are laid out in a similarly dry manner. Story was never a strong suit in those games and Project Wingman does little to try and escape the comfort zone of worldly conflicts and half-hearted attempts at personal stakes. Personality isn’t something worth looking for here and whilst that’s something of a shame, given the general dearth within the genre, it’s not something that really matters all that much once you take to the skies.
It is in the air that Project Wingman comes alive as it should, everything controls well and feels familiar to anyone with a passing experience for the genre. Movement is smooth and swift, missiles fly as intended and the roar of white hot metal is everything one might expect. Admittedly there's nothing on the face of it to differentiate Project Wingman from its contemporaries, yet it is in the lack of any overriding gimmick that makes the experience work. The game seems to understand that its primary gameplay loop really doesn't need much in the way of additions to make it fun or exciting, and instead provides just enough variance in aircraft and weaponry to avoid straightforward repetition.
That it is a budget title with a small team perhaps necessitated this approach, but it ends up paying dividends. The old adage of 'less is more' is apposite for Project Wingman, and it rightly carries the confidence in its essential gameplay to carry the experience.
Where the game does look to add additional elements is in the sorts of modes that live outside the main campaign and in how it offers further reasons to get you back in the air. There is your standard mission select and free flight options, but the addition of a conquest mode marks the closest thing to something new.
It takes elements of roguelikes and RPGs as you move from mission to mission, securing points that can in turn be used to unlock new planes and allied fighters to assist, the objective being to take territory on the world map and overcome ever more challenging missions as you do so. It offers a new take on the overall structure of how you play, but keeps the core gameplay intact, instead it looks to simply add more variety and variation beyond the standard fixed missions.
Visually the game belies the limited resources that birthed it. Ground textures are, as is the fashion with air combat games, a little rudimentary at times, but the aforementioned weather effects along with the aircraft themselves are certainly comparable to those of a larger production. It somewhat matches its approach to gameplay in keeping things simple and focusing instead on the essentials, and when it comes to flight, it's all about the sky. To that end the sun radiates the horizon, rain pounds the cockpit during storms and smoke plumes cast an effectively sulphurous fog.
In the end I suppose it helps that there is something about the sky that is almost inherently beautiful to human eyes. Whether it be the sun's majesty, the colours it produces, the vastness of it all or the nature of what lies beyond, it's hard to shake the sense that much of the appeal of Project Wingman is ready made and goes deeper than some other genres. As someone who is genuinely anxious about flying, it's odd that flight in video games is often so enticing. Where Project Wingman succeeds here is that it matches this sense of the sky's sublimity with a very instinctive and balletic combat. A bit mindless at times, a touch too simple maybe? Perhaps, but it matters little when the experience is so enjoyable.