Sometime in the early Noughties a bright spark at Activision realised flogging (mostly) mediocre PC games at budget prices would be slightly easier if the boxes the mediocrities came in were emblazoned with ‘The History Channel’. By chance one of the HC range was actually ace. Spoiler alert, the solitary corker wasn’t re-released-this-week The History Channel: Battle of Britain – World War II 1940.
HCBoB is the first Battle of Britain sim I’ve come across that lets players…
Drive down the white ‘cliffs’ of Dover in a Panther tank.
Blitz London in a Betty.
Sabre dance over the Philippines.
And lose landing gear while strafing Tunisian airfields in a Fokker triplane.
To be fair, none of the above activities are possible in the win-to-progress Battle of Britain campaign.
Because it was essentially the multi-theatre MMO WarBirds III embellished with a linear, twelve-sortie campaign playable as either the RAF or the Luftwaffe, The History Channel: Battle of Britain made mischievous history mangling relatively easy.
That WarBirdy core also meant buyers got large maps, good tutorials, solid flight and damage modelling, decent joystick support, and a plethora of useable gun stations on bombers, ships, and tracked vehicles.
Unfortunately for Activision, by the time HCBoB joined the fray in late 2003, many armchair aviators were enjoying far prettier and more sophisticated WW2 air fare. IL-2: Sturmovik, Combat Flight Simulator 3, and Rowan’s BoB were all firm favourites, and even in the budget sector there were superior options available.
In the circumstances, the fact that iEntertanment’s effort managed to bag some respectable review ratings on launch is surprising. Only my alma mater, PC Gamer, seems to have given it a hard time. I wonder if those flattering scores played a part in MicroProse’s on-the-face-of-it fairly odd decision to re-release such a forgettable, bug-speckled genre footnote.
As with every half-decent combat flight sim, there will be people out there who have happy memories of playing The History Channel: Battle of Britain. Folk who, by chance, discovered a deep love of sky skirmishing through it. To members of this select group, £6 for a convenient copy, may well seem reasonable. For everyone else, there’s simply no good reason to scratch a nostalgic itch with this when the similarly priced IL-2 and European Air War provide far more vigorous and vivid relief.
I skipped this one back in the day because it looked terrible. I look forward to giving it a shot.