Not a good sign. Roughly thirty minutes after the released-yesterday Enemy on the tail! arrived on Ada’s hard drive, I was seriously considering unarriving it. Although I wasn’t expecting much for £3.21, I was hoping for something capable of outlasting my breakfast mug of coffee.
The tragic thing about the WeGo EONT is that, thoughtfully embellished and enlarged, it could have been an extremely solid aerial wargame. Deciding which of your movement/attack cards to play each round, is fun, and the resulting jockeying captures the flavour of WW2 sky tussles darn well.
Ha! My CPU-controlled adversary was expecting me to open the throttle this turn, but instead I chopped it and let him barrel past. Another two hits, and he’s had it…
Bravo! My rival’s timely loop has turned the tables. I think it’s time I used my 5M/0A card and got the hell out of Dodge.
Unfortunately, having come-up with a simple yet evocative core mechanic and engineered an AI capable of understanding it, developer Buli16 seems to think their work is done. Purchasers get four fictional warbirds, each with their own characteristics/decks, a very basic 1v1 skirmish generator, multiplayer, and nothing else.
The game needed campaigns, real WW2 aircraft types, and activities other than dogfighting to truly shine. Despite the fact that scraps rarely last longer than five minutes, I found the time to picture relatively predictable, relatively slow moving bombers plodding around the clockface… to imagine wingmen, clouds, and board variants with different layouts and pictorial backdrops. Buli16, you’ve got the rudiments of something really entertaining here. Please consider enriching and expanding Enemy on the tail! before moving on.
You know, it is actually nice that this has established a solid foundation for simplified, yet engaging aerial combat for the era.
I can only hope that someone gets inspired by the lack of features to combine this with systems like detailed damage and more tactical approach to combat rather than 1v1 skirmishing in vacuum from tabletop solo gems like Interceptor Ace, to create something closer to Armoured Commander II (as it was long ago inspired by Patton’s Best).
There are enough solid foundations for execution of such a game, and it seems to be simple enough to create (except for the art and the UI parts), and the roster of aircraft and conflicts can be easily minimal at first and then expanded upon later, if the systems are solid enough.
But the sad part is that it is hard to find programmers for such an endeavor, since this requires either money to fund the development, or a programmer who is very enthusiastic about WWII aerial combat with a lot of spare time.
Even though I hope that this inspires someone, as a game designer I am extremely frustrated that I could write a full design document for such a game, but would hardly ever find someone to execute the design.
Although it makes me wonder if kickstarting such a project with crowdfunding might work, even though this would be a very niche product and it will struggle to attract enough publicity to fund it.