The twin-engine nightfighters have Schrage Musik autocannons pointing up from the fuselage. The altitude and navigation mechanisms are very well done. You have to scan differently for the fast-turning Me-109’s than the Nachtjager Ju-88s. The Me-410 rips you up, but is so vulnerable to your heavy ammo. This historical feel is surprisingly good for such a cartoony game. Designers Jon Wingrove and Dave Miller have done a really nice job creating some dazzling air-to-air combat vignettes with compelling historical moments. It eventually weaves an incredible amount of historical detail into an equally incredible amount of clicking and busywork. But Bomber Crew is much smarter than this. Early on, you fly some simple missions to bomb an ammo dump, or maybe a factory, or even drop supplies to a downed airman in the Channel while you fly overhead and ridiculously pick off fighters.

Then it suddenly flies off in an entirely different direction, never to return.īut before flying off into the sunset, boy, does Bomber Crew take you on a ride. In 2017, Bomber Crew breezes effortlessly over this same territory, doing loops and split-Ses as it seems to recapitulate almost everything B-17 seems to have wanted to do. In some ways, Bomber Crew is the game B-17 wanted to be, but couldn’t, because the technology of 2000 wasn’t able to handle it. It’s the adorable bobble head version of B-17 Flying Fortress: The Mighty 8th, which I reviewed seventeen years ago for GameSpot. I had been “warned” about Bomber Crew before I got it: it was a busyclicker that used a solo Lancaster bomber and its crew to make you click furiously on fire extinguishers, ammo crates, recalcitrant hydraulic systems, and a dozen other things, all while scanning the radar for enemy fighters and then scanning the skies to “tag” them so your gunners could engage those in range, and you navigated from waypoint to waypoint on your way to a target that you had to bomb through a bombsight, which included opening the bomb bay doors and selecting the appropriate bombs. Turns out that wasn’t the only thing I didn’t expect. They had a good chance of getting picked up by the Royal Navy.Įxciting, no? Much different than what I expected from a game that gave me seven bobbleheaded nine-year-olds to fly a cartoony bomber on solo missions over cartoon France and Germany. If we didn’t, my crew had sea survival vests, a dinghy, and a homing pigeon. My navigator plotted a course across the North Sea. Given a bit of breathing room, I sent my engineer to fix the port fuel tank, which was leaking, and sent the bombardier to grab a med kit and give first aid to the top turret gunner, who was down and bleeding. An agonizing thirty seconds or so later, a flight of Spitfires flew into view and took down two Messerschmidts right off the bat. So my radio operator got on the horn and requested assistance. I told my radio operator to “auto tag” and start calling out targets.

I swiveled my view around and around, trying to pick up the ones I hadn’t yet “tagged” so my gunners could focus on them. As I dropped lower, I entered a hornet’s nest of fighters. As it entered my crosshairs, I hit the “release” button and switched to my pilot to tell him to dive to low altitude. At this height it was a small-but-discernable structure, much different from the seemingly huge targets that filled my bombsight when I attacked from low altitude. The target came into view through wisps of cloud, slowly moving across my bombsight. My crew were getting cold in the atmosphere, even though they had thermal mittens and electrically heated boots, and if I didn’t get to a lower level soon they would start to get hypoxic, even though I had equipped them with “advanced oxygen bottles” which were probably made in the USA. I had to knock out some submarine pens with a mega-bomb from high altitude.

Lancaster bomber crew positions