Down in Flames

There’s a good chance you haven’t heard much about Down in Flames. It’s one of those titles that could fly under the radar of a lot of gamers, pun intended. It’s a card combat game set in the skies of WWII. You create pilots, send them into battle, and, if they survive, spend the experience they gain. It’s the lightest flying game you will play this year, and probably the most addictive.
The wartime setting is more than a shell. You get historic aircraft from four nations, each with their own attributes. Plane abilities are abstracted to a few key ratings that determine how many cards your pilots have at any given moment. So, if you don’t know your Stukas from a hole in the ground, there’s no harm done.
The core of the game is the head-to-head combat with the AI or human opponents. Inexperienced pilots are practically slaves to the luck of the draw. It’s advisable to send them against computer-controlled opponents until you get your wings. Each card you play can be countered by a few others. Play one without getting countered and you can achieve positional advantage, which gives you more shots, or score a hit with your guns. It is hard to separate luck from skill. If you have a handful of bullets but no maneuvering, you may never get to fire those shots. It’s infuriating at times, but that’s the luck of the draw.
If it sounds simple, that’s because it is. But simplicity is not the same as simple-mindedness. As in any good card game, you need to do a bit of card counting and play your hand right. Discarding and targeting decisions can be difficult, especially when you are flying wounded. Things get really interesting in the campaign mode. Here, fatigue and limited resources come into play in a way they don’t in the dogfight mode.
If gaming is about interesting decisions, Down in Flames is full of them. None of it is done with gimmicky graphics, arbitrary dice rolls, or rock-paper-scissors. Down in Flames is a testament to how a solid card game design can be translated to the computer with a minimum of chrome and not lose the features that were the point of the game to begin with.
The campaign interface is terrible. You have to go to a webpage, set up the campaign, and then join it from the main game menu. There are too many steps involved in setting up anything, and finding a human opponent you want to duel is a matter of yelling, “Anyone got a 15-point pilot?” in the chat room.
Down in Flames is a change of pace for Battlefront, a company best known for its accurate but accessible combat sims. It’s one of the least likely developers for a game of this sort, but it’s always invested in quality. Support this company. Buy this game.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #182