Since THC stumbled into being, I’ve been itching to grant MicroProse’s 1998 chart-topper European Air War, Dusty But Trusty status. Only a nasty bug that delights in crashing careers in both the GOG and on-sale-at-the-moment Steam version has stopped me.
Linked to the movies that play at regular intervals during dynamic campaigns, said bug isn’t unsquashable. At least one of the modded forms of EAW offers trouble-free careers. However, anyone that wishes to fly sortie sequences using modern screen resolutions and the pretty forgiving late-Nineties flight models faces a problem.
Those ‘1.2’ FMs together with so-so bandit AI, fairly simplistic damage modelling, and almost non-existent engine management, mean vanilla EAW lacks the authority of the two great WW2 combat flight sims that followed it into the air. More positively, they also make Tsuyoshi Kawahito’s design ideal for anyone who finds the warbird diversions of today too demanding or complicated.
One evening this week I got the urge to spend a few hours strafing trains, ventilating Bf-109s, and ripping the wings off Flying Fortresses, and didn’t fancy commencing these aerial antics with a protracted spell of pdf perusal. EAW sprung to mind and ended up fulfilling my needs almost perfectly.
After a Schwalbe-swift install, and some minor joystick-related fiddling (I needed to remove dinput.dll from the install folder in order to get full stick functionality) I found myself in the presence of one of the genre’s very best single sortie generators.
The European map used to select ground targets, and fighter sweep or interception locations, is colossal compared to the pocket handkerchiefs we tend to get nowadays. (The above screenshot shows only a small portion of it).
Impressive too are the three hangars from which steeds are selected. They contain twenty different airframes in total. Want to fly a Mustang, P-47, or P-38 all the way from East Anglia to Schweinfurt, Munich, or Pilsen. Go ahead. Fancy dogfighting, without preamble, over the Normandy beachhead in a heavily outnumbered Bf 109 or Fw 190? No problem. Wish to hurtle into sizeable formations of Heinkels in a Battle of Britain-era Spit or Hurricane? EAW is happy to oblige.
While I can’t think of any air warfare sim that bedecks skies with bandits and bacon-savers quite as energetically as Rowan’s Battle of Britain, MicroProse’s effort does a pretty grand job of communicating the scale and chaos of WW2’s larger air battles.
EAW’s habit of populating the areas around designated ground targets with targets of opportunity is also endearing. Still have some rockets or bombs left after that attack on the radar station? Why not donate them to that factory down there, or rough-up that airfield you noticed during your ingress. In the campaigns, freelancing in this manner actually impacts the course of the conflict. Frontlines move earlier or later than they moved in reality depending on how well the war is going.
No EAW recommendation would be complete without a mention of the sim’s remarkable malleability. Insert a combi-mod like OAW into your install folder and the range of crates and careers available in this beloved classic, increases exponentially.
I never managed to get terribly deep into that game due to having a busy academic and (somewhat busy) social life when it came out. Too bad as I now know I missed a true classic.
I actually remember most the immersion in the menus, a lost art today (and previously covered in THC). I think it was the US career menu screen that I would just leave up, which was a barracks decorated with pin up art, a radio playing 40s era music, and sounds of your squad mates shuffling around and clearing their throat, and occasionally the great flyby sound of a Merlin engine. At least that’s how I remember it.
Gosh, if I liked the menu so much to remember it fondly 25+ years later, it really is a shame I didn’t get much flight time in.