The premise behind SWON is simple enough: you’re an American pilot who’s been shipped overseas to help out a British "special-missions" team. You and your fellow airmen are tasked to knock out German aircraft, installations and naval fleets in order to clear a path for Allied forces. You’ll fight through dozens of battles, earning (or stealing) cool new planes along the way, working your way up to some of the super-secret aircraft that were only rumored to exist in WWII.

If you’re looking for solid gameplay with a relatively shallow learning curve, Secret Weapons has what you crave in spades. SWON’s gameplay focuses on accuracy and challenge over the Mach 5 speed you’ll see in other titles such as Crimson Skies. While the gameplay is still very arcadey, you won’t be flying around with afterburners blazing through the entire game, after all, this is a WWII title. While the majority of planes in this game are propeller-powered, the designers at Totally Games have managed to give each one an appropriate sense of speed, which maintains the quality action in the game. Fans of jet-powered titles might find the action in Secret Weapons a little slow, but those used to WWI dogfighting titles will feel that the speed is just perfect.

Mission design is clear cut and enjoyable, though at times a bit on the repetitive side. You’ll be protecting convoys, hunting down naval fleets and destroying bunkers while keeping your tail safe from Ack-Ack guns and Luftwaffe jets. Throughout the game, you’ll encounter German aces looking to rack up another kill, especially an American one. If there’s a problem with the missions, it’s in their linear nature. While you might receive an in-air mission briefing telling you that you can attack targets in any order, you’ll find the scripted actions of the AI pull you in specific directions. You’ll see that it’s best to knock out the objectives in the order they are listed, else you’ll be in the middle of a pitched attack run only to be called away to jump into a swarm of hostile action you just aren’t ready for. What’s worse, there are times you absolutely must zip over to a base for repair and halfway there you’re told you’re needed elsewhere, and if you don’t go, the entire mission fails.

There’s plenty of action in SWOM, and that means you’ll need a quick trigger finger to stay alive for long. The best thing about the combat system is the lead indicator that appears in front of your target, which predicts where you should be aiming your guns. The predictive target sight pre-calculates the speed of you and your target, along with the distance between the two of you. All this means much easier targeting than in most dogfighting games, where you simply eyeball the distances and speeds, pull the trigger and hope for the best. In SWOM, if you can get enough rounds pumped into the target indicator, you’ll shred your target quickly and efficiently.

There are some weaknesses to the gameplay, the main ones being related to collision detection. While it’s understandable that the designers traded some realism for fun, they went a little to far by negating the effects of aircraft collisions. You can slam head on into other planes, and you’ll simply bounce off one another. What’s worse, you can often fly through forests and trees, which significantly reduces the immersiveness of the game. The last big "gotcha" with the gameplay is the scripting, which is intended to move the storyline along, yet at times can punch huge holes in it. One big example: in a later mission you’ll be tasked to gun down every German plane in sight, and while you’ll easily make mincemeat of most of the planes, you’ll find that no matter how much you hammer on the last one, he always flies away from you in flames, never bailing out, exploding or crashing. What happens after a few minutes is that the plane lands, and you’re suddenly tasked to steal it away from the Germans. Miraculously, you’ll find it’s in perfect shape when you got to steal it. Obviously, this was another tradeoff the designers made between arcade action and dogfighting realism.

Totally Games did a great job capturing the look and feel of WWI combat action, with immersive audio and visual elements. The high point of the game is the planes, and they are fantastic recreations of their real-world counterparts. Scattered between missions are newsreels that you’d swear were pulled right from historical archives. And if the visuals weren’t enough to suck you into the game’s timeline, there’s the great audio. Each and every plane has a unique engine sound, guns make a terrific racket, and the enemies go "boom" real nice when you blast them. Voice acting, with chatter between pilots, and your character reading aloud his letters to home, is good, though sometimes a tad on the bland side.

The singe player game, which is the key component of Secret Weapons Over Normandy, is enjoyable, though a little too easy and definitely too short. You won’t lose more than two or three days worth of time to the game and after that, you won’t have any reason to come back to the campaign. Although there are multiplayer gameplay modes available, they aren’t online enabled, which is a real letdown. Without it, you’re stuck in the plain old split-screen multiplayer, which helps sate those multiplayer cravings, but still feels kind of lifeless.

If it weren’t for the fact that the single player game is a little too easy and the multiplayer doesn’t support online gaming, SWON would be one of the best aircraft games of the year. As it stands, it’s a solid title with lots of fun built into it, and while our scores might make it seem like a game everyone should own, the brevity of the single-player campaign keeps it from being a "must have." It’s a good game, that’s for certain, but one best enjoyed as an extended rental.

See more screens on the Secret Weapons Over Normandy media page