When blown up onto a 4K television it does feel like you’re playing a phone game but not a particularly ugly one. Load times are quick and both planes and the environments are reasonably detailed for the small integrated screen on the Switch. The side effect of this, however, is that the entire system feels pointless.Īt the very least, Warplanes looks alright and runs well on Switch. This is adjusted for in the Switch version by simply pummeling the player with an incredible amount of loot at the end of each level so you’re never prevented from proceeding. The whole thing was very clearly originally a wall of microtransactions in the mobile version, designed to keep players from playing too long for free. These resources can be used to buy more planes, bring in more pilots, upgrade the equipment you have, or build out your base to house more resources, pilots, and planes. Between every mission you’ll be sent back to your base with the resources you won. Your plane on the whole just feels stiff.īehind the titular dogfights, Warplanes also features a base building and pilot training mechanic. You can’t flip over as an enemy is tailing you to get behind them (not that the AI is anywhere near good enough to tail you), nor can you rotate your plane along the Z-axis to go into a tight turn as you pursue an enemy.

You can slowly turn left and right and gradually drift up or down, but you can’t do any interesting maneuvers. But doing this simply leads to another of Warplanes’ flaws: your plane isn’t fun to fly. Now to be fair, one could simply not use the target lock in order to re-introduce some challenge. This doesn’t just direct your camera towards a target to aid in tracking it literally takes over control of your ship and even leads your shots. When you do you’ll be encouraged to lock onto the enemy. That’s all well and good until you actual make it into combat.

Things play out in third person, with your plane’s direction being controlled with the left stick and its speed being adjusted on the right. Presumably to aid mobile players, the controls and behavior of your aircraft have been simplified to an egregious degree. I say light because so much of what that genre would normally entail is woefully absent here. Warplanes: WW2 Dogfights is an extremely light aerial dogfighting game.

Warplanes: ww2 dogfight switch test