by Lloyd “Gus” Sabin, 10 December 2024
Do you remember Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol games? They were released around 10 years ago as cutesy little turn-based air combat games, one set in the Pacific during World War II and then a subsequent release set on the Western Front during World War I.
They were not earth-shattering, they were definitely not sims, and they didn’t set the world on fire…but they were fun beer ‘n’ pretzel fare for a couple of hours on a Friday night, zipping combat aircraft around a digital ‘game board’ in a third-person, turn-based, miniaturized perspective.
click images to enlarge
Scramble: Battle for Britain is currently in Early Access and it gives me the vibes that someone, somewhere, played those Ace Patrol games and said to themself, ‘Self…we can do much better than this.’ And then they did.
Since it is still in Early Access, there is no Scramble: Battle for Britain campaign yet. The number of flyable planes is limited right now to Spitfires and Me109s, with other German aircraft like Me110s and Stukas modeled as enemy targets.
It has been a VERY long time since I have played any Battle of Britain-based games and I got nostalgic flashbacks to playing some of the LucasArts lite-sim games from the late 1980s, primarily Their Finest Hour…one of my favorites of all time.
No campaign yet in Scramble: Battle for Britain, but there is a dogfight generator as well as a squadron leader feature – I only played around with Scramble: Battle for Britain for a couple of hours, attempting to learn the controls, the HUD and get a general feel, so I have not tried those out yet.
I can report that the turn-based aerial combat, while requiring some time to get comfortable with, is fun.
Turn-based pilots can bank, adjust throttle, dive and engage with guns through a series of commands issued every turn, and it does become engaging once the player gets the controls down. Using the keyboard to issue orders to your pilot(s) was easier for me than using the mouse. It does look like key commands are customizable but I did not attempt re-binding them yet. It is also absolutely possible to nose dive into the Channel if you do not know what you are doing.
Additionally, this is not a sim, nor does it aspire to be one. And since it is turn-based, any kind of joystick support would feel very…odd.
The game ran perfectly fine on my four year old machine and the graphics will not burn your retinas with their intensity, but Scramble: Battle for Britain was visually pleasing enough…certainly more so than the older Sid Meier Ace Patrol games, which were quite ‘cartoony.’
I am very much looking forward to the full release here. There is a great foundation here for a WWII flight game that is not a byzantine, difficult sim to learn while also not being a cartoony game that feels like it was designed for a phone. Scramble: Battle for Britain strikes a great balance between those two nodes and I am really hoping it sells well, so other theaters and even other wars can eventually be covered.
A game based on the S:BoB engine set in the First World War is an obvious great expansion choice, while other theaters of the Second World War feel almost imminent. I hope nothing stops the developers from exploring, dare I say, the Korean War and maybe even some conflicts that had an epic air campaign in the Middle East or in Southeast Asia.
For now, Scramble: Battle for Britain is shaping up to be a great first attempt at a more serious, tactically-based air combat game – I can’t wait to see what comes next.
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