Project Wingman Dogfights over a scorched Earth

This is combat flying with the arcade dial turned up. You skim the ground with a gatling gun and rocket launchers on your wings, or fly interceptor with long-range missiles that behave like sniper shots. The arsenal runs past 40 weapons across more than 20 aircraft, from multi-lock missiles for swatting whole squadrons to unguided bombs for ships. Railguns and geothermal armaments punish carelessness, so you manage speed and flares while a furball of dozens of planes churns around you. The controls are built for pick-up-and-play, not checklist flying: pull tighter turns by slowing down, dump flares to break a missile lock, and line the gun reticle on a bandit before he lines up on you.

The campaign drops you into an alternate history where a scorched Earth burns through its own war, and you fly as a mercenary for the invaded side. Missions swing from cold water over the Bering Strait to the magma fields of Yellowstone to dives through the Redwoods of the Pacific Northwest, and the odds are always above your pay grade. The story leans into spectacle and radio chatter, and it has a point: war is bad, and the game keeps saying so in increasingly dramatic ways. The soundtrack carries a lot of that weight, and it is the thing people mention first. One honest note: missions can run long and there are no checkpoints, so a late crash means flying the whole sortie again.

Once the campaign is done, Conquest mode flips the game over. It is a territory capture campaign with roguelike and RPG bones: you earn money, buy new aircraft, and assemble a mercenary army of your own to push back waves of ever harder opposition, including boss fights and ace squadrons of the kind that gave you trouble in the story. Missions keep changing, so no two pushes across the map play out the same. If the default difficulty is not to your taste, modifiers let you adjust the whole experience. It is the mode that turns one good flight game into a hundred short sessions.