Ace, in the hole: Snoopy Flying Ace (XBLA) – Review – Xbox 360

By PlayingMantis on 09 June 2010 in Reviews, Xbox 360 with 207 Comments

With the loss of LIVE servers for original Xbox games, those glorious skies of crimson have gone dark for many a flying ace. Smart Bomb Interactive looks to step into that void with Snoopy Flying Ace…

Graphics

The graphics have a pleasant stlye, being cartoony but not over-exaggerated. The Peanuts characters are faithfully reproduced. The WWI outfits are the real standouts here, with each character having their own unique uniform. Strangely, some of the planes appear to be made from a burlap patchwork. I don’t know if this has some basis in the Peanuts series, or if Smart Bomb is merely borrowing the style from the immensely popular Little Big Planet.

Other than the title screen and end credits, there isn’t any animation or video involving the characters. Mission Briefs and Loading screens use still artwork, mostly in a war propaganda style.

Score – 8/10

Sound

The sound works well. The opening music sets an epic war mood with pounding hammers and frenetic violins. The planes sound like planes should, and weapon sounds are diverse. The only irritant regarding sound is a near constant pinging from homing weapons, as you will be almost always in someone’s sights.

Score – 8/10

Story

Other than explaining the mission at hand, story is close to non-existant. There is no real over-arching storyline. There may be a couple lines of banter between missions, and a couple lines of bluster from enemy leaders (Red Baron, Lucy van Pelt, etc.) between waves during missions.

Score – 6/10

Gameplay

The planes are slow, giving no real sense of speed. This may be related to the era, as bi-planes weren’t nearly the speed machines that later generations would become. The light planes are much better, but are very low on health.

Handling is overly simplified. It is not possible to do a natural barrel roll. You can turn sharply, but you don’t directly control the roll of your ship. What this means is that you can’t really correct your orientation explicitly if you are un-level/upside down. You have to let go of the stick to straighten out and get level with the horizon.

This lapse in maneuverability could be the difference between life and death.

Single Player

Snoopy Flying Ace is primarily a multi-player game. The single player “campaign” is limited to 18 missions in all, split into nine different single player mission types, featuring two of each. Half the missions involve dog fighting the Red Baron’s squadrons, while other levels task you with following the leader, racing through rings, or rescuing Woodstock and his avian friends from the Red Baron’s floating mine fields.

The most enjoyable for me were the “Big Guns” and “Bombs Away” missions, which have you manning anti-aircraft turrets and dropping bombs on enemy targets. This preference for the turrets also bled through to multiplayer.

Score – 6/10

Multi-player

This is the meat of the game. You choose your pilot from among the Peanuts characters (you can also use your avatar), plane, and two secondary weapons. There is a good variety of weaponry to choose from, and you can change your loadout between respawns if your current setup isn’t working for you.

While there are several planes to choose from, they are split into three categories: Light, Medium, and Heavy. Every plane in the same class shares the same speed, health, and handling stats. Unless there are more statistics hidden behind the scenes, then there is no reason to pick one plane of the same class over another, other than for cosmetics.

There are a variety of different game modes, pretty much what you would expect from a multi-player game. Dog Fight (free-for-all), Dog Pile (tag), team variants of these two modes, Capture the Flag, and Pigskin, (football).

Unfortunately there are some problems that sully the experience.

Planes are hard to see and often obscured by the wash of gamertags floating above them. Smart Bomb needs to scrap the gamertag displays and instead use small enemy/ally symbols. This is not a problem unique to Snoopy Flying Ace…
Ammunition is too plentiful and regenerates too quickly. You are constantly being barraged with homing missiles. This over abundance of ammo means that no real dog fighting can occur.
There are only 9 maps, so longevity is questionable.
Maps are generally small. Given the speed of the planes, this is perhaps a good thing. However, it leads to spawn-killing, as you pop back into the game and you instantly have a homing missile coming at you.
XP is scarcer than gold.

There are occasional lulls where you can actually get in a bit of dog fighting, but the only way to survive more than a few seconds is to hang around the edge of the maps. Basically all you can do is aim into the mass of gamertags and constantly fire your weapons, hoping for a hit.

Score – 6/10

Achievements & Avatar Awards

The achievements are a mix of easy and extremely hard. Mostly hard though. Some can be boosted by creating a private match with a bot, although if you get a match against a batch of complete noobs, you might just be able to pull off “Flawless” naturally.

Strangely, Snoopy Flying Ace only has one Avatar Award. It’s a Charlie Brown T-Shirt, and it’s pretty nice. Better than the first tier Avatar Awards that most games have, it is easily unlocked by earning at least one silver medal on each of the single-player missions.

Actually, Snoopy Flying Ace has two Avatar Awards, but casual players will probably never get the second one, which is a Red Baron outfit for your avatar. The outfit is tied to the “Flying Ace” achievement, which tasks you with earning 25,000 experience points.

Each kill is only worth a base of 5 points. Special kills (revenge, bone carrier, flag carrier, etc.) will net you extra points, but the first couple hours only saw a total of 748XP, and it took me about six more hours to earn a total of 5,000XP. All in all, it will take over 30+ hours of playtime to earn all the multiplayer achievements, unless you get really lucky and get matched with some completely incompetent players.

By comparison, a WWI fighter pilot was considered a “Flying Ace” after five confirmed kills.

Summary

Snoopy Flying Ace is hard to pick up, and until you do, you will be hating the Multi-player. Once you have been baptized in fire (and I am speaking literally here, you will be burned repeatedly by the Leeches) and learn how to effectively evade your pursuers, you will begin to enjoy the game.

With a few balancing tweaks, Snoopy Flying Ace could be the next big thing in online aerial combat. Smart Bomb needs to double the baseline XP for kills, and limit the regeneration of ammo. The hardcore nature of the achievements will push many people away, especially when they learn that the Red Baron outfit is not so easily obtained. As it stands, it feels like the achievements are simply designed to keep the multi-player play-lists active.

Thankfully the game is priced at 800 Microsoft Points ($10.00US). Based on the amount of content here, $15.00 would be too much. With a longer campaign, more involved story, and more multi-player maps, Snoopy could have justified a higher price tag.

If I were to compare Snoopy to a Crimson Skies color wheel, I would call Flying Ace “Salmon Skies”. There’s a little bit of red in there, but it’s no crimson.

Pros