This little gem is actually quite intereresting. Made for smart phones and Tablets originally but ported to the PC and beamed into our collective HD using the magic that is STEAM Ace Patrol is about two things. Biplane Hex Combat and more importantly fun.

Gameplay is basically this. You pick a nation (UK, France, Imperial Germany or America!) and each nation has a selecton of randomly generated pilots with aeroplanes of the era and you dogfight the enemy using a turn based hex combat system. Your squadron can have up to four Pilots who fly a series of randomly generated missions over four different offensives against NPC pilots who like your own can be captured or forced temporary out of the war to repair their damaged crates. Both friendly and enemy squadron Pilots unlock RPG-esqe skills, upgrades for their planes and learn special manauvers that give them the upper hand in combat. Oh and as the offensive progresses so does air technology for both sides. You might be flying easy one moment and then the enemy has a fancier crate with another set of wings and a bigger gun to keep you on your toes!

Combat itself is pretty simple, get a good shot under or behind the enemy plane whilst not exposing yourself to the dangers of their wingmans guns or AA gun fire. You are graded with a score system that is tied to the general STEAM achivements and online leaderboard for said game. To increase the score obviously you'll have to ratchet up the difficulty level (or be lucky enough to get a Pilot with the DOUBLE SCORE ability).

The other feature to keep you playing again is once you complete a Offensive with a certain nation the first time you unlock famous WW1 Ace Pilots with their own biplane livery schemes.

Bugs wise I've only encountered one and that sometimes you have some trouble clicking on a hex, this gets really fiddly when your Pilot has a million manuvers and you really don't want to select the FORCE LANDING one. I expect this is to do with it being more of a Tablet game really. Also, some of the art assets are slightly bland (Don't get excited about seeing the Offensive Victory screen more than once) despite the fact they did their best locked more or less in a single location.

Is it worth buying though? sure, why not if you want a addictive but slighty short turn based aeroplane game . But for the best value get it in a Sale and make sure you pick up the rather decent WW2 Pacific Campaign sequal at the same time.

Bland, limited & repetitive gameplay is what you can expect from Sid's Ace Patrol. I really tried to enjoy this (I put in the time!), but it has none of the 'one-more-turn' addictiveness of his other games.

So why is it so bad you ask?

Each map looks almost identical, graphics look like direct port from mobile platform, the mission types you can count on one hand & the game itself is very short covering 24 missions across 4 campaigns. They can go quick too! You do not feel there is any progression as you go through as the game centres around your score; having little in the way of feeling like you are winning a war. There is no territory to defend or conquer instead you choose from 3 random missions then up to 4 pilots to progress through each level. Pilot & plane upgrades are rewarded as you proceed through your game, but only really make it easier to win & that isn't really a strong point when the 'Legend' difficulty is not really very challenging. Legend (besides boosting your score) just makes it more frustrating than anything else since the opposing pilots get big stats boosts making it take a painfully long time to shoot them down yet much easier for you to be shot down.

Tactically you will find many dogfights are reduced to both of you flying around in circles for multiple moves until the AI decides to fly out giving you an opening to attack. You can try different tactics but it always comes back to 'circling' from my experience. Once you get behind someone it is very hard for them to get away (unless they're an Ace pilot), and likewise when the roles are reversed. It makes the first few turns of your engagement most important, but then very predictable after that. To add to this, I also couldn't play this on my old PC with ATI graphics as it wouldn't render the display, showing all white, so I have only been able to play recently since I got my new PC with NVidia graphics.

All said & done, I can't help but to ask myself why Sid would put his name on such a sub-par game, let alone make a sequel! Also milking it further by charging almost twice as much locally in AU @ $8.99 instead of US @ $4.99 (still well overpriced for what you get if you ask me).

Very disappointing! :(


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Ace Patrol is a turn-based air combat game. If you've ever played a civilization game in your life you will instantly recognize the hex grid across which you direct your squadron. There are some really neat concepts here; each pilot has their own flight competencies which enable them to take increasingly more aggressive maneuvers. As you navigate the battlefield you must take into account all of the factors one normally would in a flight combat simulator. From the angle of attack and altitude all the way to the direction you’re currently banking, every aspect affects the options you have for your next turn.
It’s a neat game, but I would love to see it brought back with more graphical polish and a more robust tutorial. During my time playing, everything felt very disjointed and fragmented. It’s not a bad little strategy game, but doesn't feel fully realized.

I bought this game right when it was released, but I suppose I forgot about it for a while, while I had plenty of other games to play. Two months have passed, and today I finally realized it was time I tried it.... and damn! It's actually a fun game!

Having Sid Meier's name in the title, I expected this game to be heavy, super-deep and difficult to learn, kinda like Civilization, but it's actually pretty simple, intuitive and easy to get into. I've only been playing for a few hours, and while I'm sure the more advanced missions and the harder difficulty levels can make the game very challenging and complex, it's very begginer-friendly on 'easy mode', so I'm quite happy that for once, I put my ego aside and started with the lowest difficulty level (I usually choose "Normal" or whatever the medium difficulty level is called).

Ugh, not sure how to summarize this, so I'll just go grab something to eat. C'ya. :P

Great early game but as you progress on and have some 30 missions under your belt then you will really start to wonder why you play this game. Achievements? no way unless you really like to grind. Tactics? yes sure i guess. you have a lot of moves available at this time and you use them constantly.

Quite bland and does not contain the 'one more mission' -bait.

I suppose this can be recommended with caveats. Know what you buy when you fork over cash for this.

6/10.

Enjoyed the first time through on original game, though it's far too short. Unfortunately, it has nearly no replay value. Maybe future updates or DLC will fix this.

Ace Patrol feels like a port of a mobile game with no challenge. In a mere hour, I blew through half of the missions. You get to see the mission grid, much like other mobile games. You get four pilots / planes and pilot them on missions. Mostly blow up other planes. Sometimes, blow up tanks or zeplins. The game is turn based and played out on a hexigrid with each plane getting a certain amount of spaces based on their speed or altitude.

As you progress mission after mission, your planes / pilots will level up and gain skills you can chose from. You will also unlock upgrades to equip to your 4 planes. These skills feel useless and very subtle. You don't need the skills or upgrades before you get them. Never once did I feel like now that upgrade will totally help me do better.

This is just a very dull game. The maps look identical. The only real thing you even need to concern yourself with each map is enemy territory that will shoot you down, but enemy territory is so sparse, that you'll barely run into it. Plus its easy to avoid. The only way to hide from an enemy is hang out in clouds, but since you operate planes, you cannot really stay in clouds since you'll always be moving.

Avoid this game. Maybe on a phone it would be more fun to kill a bit of time with, but on PC, its just too easy to blow through.

This game exists for the ipad and its exactly the same there as it is on the PC. If anything, the way the controls work makes it better on the ipad. Except for one small detail, its free on the ipad...

I find it insulting that i had to put up money for it when a better version is offered for free on another platform.

For that reason alone, i do not recomend buying it.

The game itself is not that bad and features some interesting concepts (a turn-based flight simulator!). There is one reason I'm downvoting it.

If your Windows username contains any non-ASCII characters (anything Cyrillic, German umlauts, French accents etc.), you can't save. Period. The game won't tell you this, though. You'll spend a few hours tearing through missions, accumulating experience, saving your progress religiously, then you'll restart the game, and surprise! No saves. Please start from the beginning.

Again, I have to stress this. It's XXI century. We're not dealing with DOS code pages here. OK, suppose it's so very difficult to support Unicode in a 2013 game. It's a generous assumption, but I'm feeling generous. Why can't you warn the user, then? Tell them you can't save their game, because their name is wrong?
And here's the zinger: this bug has been known for almost five years now. The developers acknowledged it, then chose to do precisely nothing about it. I've decided to dust this game off today, see if the bug has been fixed. It hasn't. So I'm writing this.

Don't buy this game. Don't support this kind of behavior. The game is not even _that_ good.

This Game is Great! It's like the Panzer Corps of the sky (although with less pieces and less missions). Its a lot of fun and it never really gets old as you will always be competing to get the best pilots possible! Ever seen the Blue Max? Now you can fight to win Germany's highest aviation medal in this game! The war develops and so do your planes. Ace Patrol Pacific sky's I also highly recommend because its more missions and more planes! Plus there are acutally battles where your planes keep damage points until the battle finishes, so you have to be careful. I hope they continue this game series because its really fun! Need to enterain yourself for a few minutes? Then this game is perfect! It's got hotseat to so you can battle against your brother, sister and your friends!

But wait what about all those bad reviews saying that this game has lots of glitches and every mission is the same? Thats not remotely true in my opinion. I've never had a single error and I doubt the majority of players do. None of my friends have had those problems either. The game is extremely simple and its fun to play. You can pick it up in ten minutes and be an expert player in a day! Wont it get really old then real soon? No, it wont! You can adjust the difficulty and it actually changes the way you have to play the game. Shure, that applies to almost every game with difficulty settings. You can also change your nation and each nation dosent play the same. I've found Germany and the United States to have the hardest campaigns. France and Britian get pretty good planes early, the Germans too, but in most missions the odds are stacked against the Germans. The United States has a troublesome time getting the good balanced planes that players crave (the triplane has more guns but it goes down in flames a lot)

Anyway, I want you to ask yourself (if your considering gettting this game). Is it worth it? Based on this description, does it captivate my attention? If yes, then look no further. If no, you should probably whatch some gameplay, and if thats not enough, then try to see if you have a friend who will let you play for a while. Its a great game, almost like an animated board game at times, and I've had a great time playing it so far!