Death Wing (Playstation)

 Death Wing (also listed on some sites as The Operation: Death Wing) is clearly a game that was made with a strong artistic vision in mind. Right from the start, the game presents a very strong aesthetic. The first thing you see is a very stylish FMV intro with black and white footage of real people in 1996 intercut with footage of the game. I don't know exactly what this is all supposed to mean, though, since the game is a 3D spaceship shooting game that appears to be set in a very distant future. But it looks cool, and that seems to have been a high priority for the developers.

 

Before each mission, there are more FMVs. No real people in these, though, just very cool-looking wireframe animations showing your mission objective, along with boxes of text that are obviously too low resolution to actually read (though in the unlikely event that this game ever gets a HD remaster, that might prove interesting, assuming enough of the original assets even still exist for that to happen), and the missions themselves have a few seconds before you're given control where the camera swoops around, showing all the stuff that's in the stage.

 

Most impressive of all of this, though, is that while it's a little constrained by its host hardware, with things like draw distance and such, it's still a very nice-looking game. Certain stages are especially spectacular, like the one where you're assaulting some kind of giant tower built on the surface of a still-active star, or fighting a big snake-like robot in the midst of a giant outer space thunderstorm. But we're three paragraphs into this review, and I haven't even started describing how the game plays yet, so let's get into that.

 

Like I said, it's a 3D spaceship shooter, like a more complex version of SEGA's Star Wars Arcade, or alternatively, an Ace Combat game in space. The missions with which you're tasked usually involve one or more really big things (space ships, stations, buildings, etc.) that are your targets, and a bunch of annoying smaller fighter ships that will fly around trying to kill you. After a few stages, the little fighters will sometimes be replaced with armadas of giant battleships! It all works as well as these games usually do, though being set in speace, it is sometimes a little too easy to lose your bearings. The enemy fighters are also a lot more aggressive than the enemies in similar games I've played, too, and you really have to manage them or you'll get torn apart quickly, even in the first stage.

 

One nice feature, that's made it a little easier to take varied screenshots for this review, despite my inabilty to get past the third stage is that it uses an Outrun-style branching path structure! So there's two second missions and four third missions! All the third missions represent a massive ramp up in difficulty, though, so I don't know how many more there are after that.

 

I'd recommend giving Death Wing a try! If you like this kind of 3D shooting game, it seems to be a perfectly competent example of the genre (though I admit I'm not an expert, so maybe it sucks actually), and otherwise, it's a game that looks great and has a strong aesthetic and atmosphere to it that's worth experiencing, even if only for a short time.