Air Conflicts: Vietnam

[H1] A flawed but decent arcade combat game that mostly succeeds at telling an engaging account of the Vietnam War 7/10 [/H1] Having played and enjoyed the two previous entries in the Air Conflicts series I was looking forward to this third game now set in the Vietnam War. Unlike World War 2 there isn't the sheer volume of games in this conflict and even fewer flight games. The "Mostly Negative" reviews on steam did give me pause but I am glad I gave the game a go a I really enjoyed my time with it. The graphics are pretty decent where it counts. All the aircraft look pretty good and the cockpit modes have some nice touches like scratches on the canopy and do vary by aircraft. The landscapes aren't bad as you race by and serve their purpose to differentiate locations. There are some rough edges, land units look like they are floating about the ground and aren't very detailed. The game is split into 3 eras of the war "Advisor Era", "Escalation of the Conflict" and "Vietnamization". Each era has multiple missions each of which begin with an update on the situation and what your mission is to achieve. You then will see which aircraft you will get to control in the mission. There is a great range of fighters, bombers, attack and transport helicopters. You often fly as part of a squadron whose aircraft you can jump into in most missions. This means you can jump from your Huey (unarmed) helicopter into one of your squad mates Cobra Attack Helicopters and clear the air defences from your route before jumping back and making your run. With the transport helicopters you are often making for one pickup point and then taking those troops to another. Sometimes you will switch to the door gunner and have to take out troops and vehicles around the landing zone. These segments are on rails and were not my favourite. You can hear you are being shot and see your armor going down but sometimes with the smoke, red mist from injury and the rough land graphics it is difficult to see where you are being shot from. Fortunately on normal difficulty you don't take that much damage so you can eventually find them and take them out. Planes are no longer the sole focus unlike in the previous 2 games so it felt rare I got to fly them. These segments are good fun apart from one major flaw. The maps for each mission are very small, meaning you can fly off the edge and get the return to combat message all to easily. It does feel like you are boxing in a lift and never get to really exploit the planes you are given. I do love how when you hit the afterburners you can get a sonic boom shame seconds later you need to turn around. Bombing sequences are pretty decent. I did have to play the game with the arcade controls as I found when I switched to bomb view my plane would just take a nose dive. With arcade controls it maintains you altitude to a degree and prevents you turning into a death dive. Each mission stage has you complete one or two objectives before fading to a cutscene, then often returning you right where it left you. This does help to update you on what is going on but also made me feel like the game could only handle a limited amount of actions before having to reset and then let you do two more. It makes the game feel a little disjointed and small scale which is a shame but not a game breaker. As with the previous games there is a story to go alongside the conflict. You play mostly as Joe Thompson and, in addition to your briefings before missions, you get narrated letters from either your brother (who has joined the Marines to try and live up to his brother), your mother (who is worried about you both), Lisa your wife or later on your daughter Zoe. These do a great job of bringing home the changing public opinion about the war and it made me think about how the soldiers fighting the war felt when these sentiments changed. The ending is fairly true to the war itself, there is no VE or VJ day here and no parades on return. I think it is probably the strongest story of the 3 games. This game does have 2 bugs/issues I wanted to touch on. I had no problems getting it running on windows 11 and it never crashed. It worked with no problems with a wireless xbox controller. The performance was pretty poor initially. However if you enable the beta branch for the game. (right click the game in your library list, properties, beta, and select beta from the drop down) this seemed to improve the performance so I got no hitching on max settings (except draw distance that I couldn't set about 1 without slowdown). The other is a bug in the mission Operation Game Warden. You need to drop Illumination Bombs on a target but no matter how many you drop the mission never completes. This is apparently due to a scripting error but fortunately FvJ has posted a fix in the forums which is fairly easy to implement. It is a shame this was the end of this series. I really love arcade flight combat games and it seems like there haven't been many for the past decade, especially not covering older conflicts. This I think is a good addition to the series and despite it's flaws was a fun game and a great story. 7/10

This game was pretty fun when I played it on console years ago, but on PC you have to struggle to get the game to crash without launching, it crashes mid-mission frequently anyway, and I can't get more than a quarter of the way through the game because the illumination bombs don't count even when they land in their target area. A shame, I really wanted to enjoy this game again.

Feeling of really flying over the jungle of Vietnam. I play a little arcade but for those who like it, it's too much. Spectacular explosions. One of the good game set in vietnam. Magnificent ambient sound. I recommend.

Good game

Крутая игруха!!!

Il n'y a qu'un seul qualificatif qui me vient à l'esprit : Une bouse

good fun game missions a bit repetative

GOOD morning Vietnam!!!!!

très bon , on peut avoir le f 4 phamtom , une avion que j'aime beaucoup mon avis très bon jeu.

Chatão.