November 18, 2003 - In 1991 Larry Holland released a great flight sim for the PC. Titled Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, it offered a nice change of pace for those of us used to the less speculative titles like Red Baron or Chuck Yeager's Air Combat. Instead, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe presented us with a chance to try out lots of experimental planes that never saw any (or much) service during the Second World War. Though Larry's team was better known for their subsequent work on the TIE Fighter and X-Wing franchises, in the back of our minds we'd always hoped that they'd someday return to the skies above Europe for more classic dogfight action.

And though that's largely what we're getting with the sequel Secret Weapons Over Normandy, a few changes have been thrown in to the mix, not all of them for the better. First and foremost, Secret Weapons attempts to bridge the gap between historical accuracy and arcade sensibility. Part of this can be explained by the downward spiral of the profitability of sim genre over the last few years. LucasArts can realize much higher returns on their investment development with the PS2 and Xbox versions and it's apparent that that's the target for this game.

Gameplay
You'll play as Chase, an American pilot serving with the RAF at the start of the Dunkirk evacuation. (As Hitler's armies rolled across Northern France, the English had to perform a miraculous and rapid evacuation of their forces on the continent.) After showing your mettle in this mission, you're recruited into the Battlehawks, an elite international squadron designed to counter-act Germany's infamous Nemesis Squadron. And though this concept of an elite Allied squadron fighting on all fronts provides a great survey to the action and planes of the war, it also offers very little in the way of narrative cohesion.

For one thing, there's very little sense of character or story in the game. Since you're traveling from one area of the war to another, it's hard to tie one mission to the next. A History Channel-style presentation gives you context for the particular engagement but the game might have made better use of the actual characters from your squadron (and your enemy's) to create some meaningful emotional connections here but instead we're simply presented with a variety of players who are only differentiated by their names and accents. There's the plain-speaking American pilot, the stuffy Brit, the arrogant German and few others but none stand out as particularly memorable or engaging.

Some continuity is provided by the letters Chase writes between the missions but these have their own problems. Though the game makes certain allowances with the history, I still can't swallow the fact that a member of an elite air squadron would write such detailed descriptions of his plans to his parents. "Hey, mom! Tomorrow we're attacking a V-2 rocket plant! Don't tell Jerry!" It might sound nitpicky, but these small inconsistencies go a long way towards reminding you that you're just playing a game.

The missions themselves are fairly diverse, ranging from ground support actions where you have to protect the advance of your tanks from enemy forces on the ground to ship strikes where you have to torpedo certain destroyers or transports while keeping others safe. And of course, there's plenty of aerial action here as well. Dogfight and bomber intercepts are definitely the main course here. The team makes good use of scripting within the missions to give them a more dynamic character and a handy checkpoint system ensures that you won't have to start from scratch if you auger in during the last few minutes of a mission. A range of hidden bonus objectives are included for you overachievers out there and these can help unlock extra upgrade tokens for your planes.

Throughout the course of the war, from the Miracle at Dunkirk to the assaults on secret German weapon labs through to the D-Day landings, you'll find yourself in the office of a number of different aircraft, some of which are based on cutting edge models in production at the very end of the war. Standbys like the Mustang and Zeke are par for the course here but the more fanciful additions like the Komet and Flying Pancake lend a certain element of fantasy to the game. Each is modeled according to a range of performance characteristics including speed, handling, firepower and armor and each can be equipped with formidable secondary weapons like torpedoes, cannons and the like. There are even some of the titular secret weapons here with guided rockets and such.