Rowan's Battle of Britain - PC Games

The designers set out to model the entire pivotal WWII conflict and succeeded admirably, creating some of the best flight models and visuals this genre has ever seen. With all the realism options turned off it's basically reduced to the level of an arcade game, but with those same options enabled even the most jaded virtual pilots will have their hands full. This is the kind of simulation that lets players manually tweak the pitch of their propellers and makes players deal with issues such as carburetted vs. fuel-injected engines, engine torque, and blackouts from pulling too many Gs.

The designers certainly didn't focus on minute details at the expense of the Battle of Britain's strategic possibilities. The game engine is capable of throwing hundreds of planes in the air at once, and simulates raids whether they are part of your particular mission or not. It's possible to take off with the intention of intercepting a small flight of Stuka dive-bombers only to end up responding to a massive raid of heavy bombers attacking a town miles away. Few games give the player such a sense of playing a bit part on the stage of battle.

That's not to say the gamers' actions and input are inconsequential. Battle of Britain also comes with a campaign mode that lets players make strategic decisions as either the British or the Germans. As the British, players get reports on incoming raids and must apportion their meagre resources to effectively meet each threat. German commanders get to deal with the problem of assigning fighter escorts to the bombers, knowing that the fighters can't spend more than 20 minutes over enemy soil because of fuel limitations. Those are just a few of the situations players face, and it's possible to jump into any plane in the campaign mode to play out its mission in the simulation mode. --T. Byrl Baker