Why don’t we have a starfighter mobile game yet?

While this post is perhaps outside the scope of this blog’s usual meat&potatoes of galactic reenacting research and costume crafting, I still think it’s a worthwhile concept that I think many of you will appreciate, and which I hope gains traction! I trust that my aviation historian readers will note the date: 7 September, 1940 marked the beginning of nighttime bombing of London that became known as the Blitz.

As part of ‘inner persona’ “research” for the pilot impression I’ve been working on, I’m always looking for ways to gain insight into the flyboy life. I can only rewatch Top Gun, or Maverick‘s trench run so many times, and while some of Dan Hampton’s books were decent overviews, they’re largely lacking the level of detail I crave. At the same time (whether a cause or byproduct of the pilot project, I’m not sure), I’ve been on a bit of a Second World War kick lately and was curious if there are any good WW2 pilot-based mobile games to play on my lunch break. Luckily, I managed to find one that I think is pretty much perfect, and it got me thinking…

Simply called “Warplanes: WW2 Dogfight” from HomeNet Games, the controls and gameplay are definitely on the arcade-y side of things (it is a far cry from being a flight sim) but there’s a great variety of planes, they’re well modeled, and everything looks very pretty (these screenshots don’t do it justice!):

Apparently there’s a more strategic (i.e. boring) resource-micromanaging gameplay mode, but thankfully this can be entirely ignored if all you’re interested in is military ornithology and dogfighting. As you might expect, the game is based around the now-standard casual-mobile-game ‘freemium loop’* (complete mission, get money, use money to buy upgrades or unlock vehicles, complete more missions, repeat), and as a man of simple tastes, that’s all I was looking for…but then I started wondering: why the hell does a GFFA version of this game not exist yet? You could keep literally everything the same, swap out the planes for their starfighter equivalents, drop in some Ben Burtt sound effects, and the thing would practically write itself. The way the planes’ tracers are animated basically look like laser blasts already, so what are we waiting for?

Warplanes lets you play as the UK, USA, USSR, Imperial Japan, and Third Reich Germany – so why couldn’t there be a clone war CIS/Republic, then Alliance/Empire match-ups?
After picking a mission type (offensive, defensive, naval, etc) you get a briefing from an admiral or general from your country; feed a list of galactic faction leaders, planets, and sectors into our hypothetical code and have it spit out a random scenario: “General Orrimaarko’s spies have received word of an Imperial supply depot on Sulon. Green Flight must destroy this depot to weaken Imperial strength in the Brema sector. Be sure you load your ships with plenty of pulse bombs, you’ll need them for this mission!”

-Instead of a Hawker Hurricane, start with something basic like a Z-95 Headhunter
-Earn Credits instead of gold
-Upgrade your crafts’ shields and blasters (instead of armor and machine guns)
-Buy a T-65 instead of a Mk1 Spitfire as soon as possible.
-Then save up for, I dunno, a CR-90 (instead of a B-17)?

All the maps are gorgeous and over land (North Africa, NW Europe, Pacific Theater, or frozen Eastern Front) and sea, and you could definitely keep this in a GFFA translation – hell, the original Rogue Squadron game didn’t have a single space mission! Honestly, the only element that would be tricky to translate are bombing-centric missions, since there’s not a clear 1:1 equivalency to WW2 heavies like the B-24, B-17, Halifax, Lancaster, etc, although Rogue Squadron just used the Y-wing. (Despite what some sources will tell you, that particular craft seems originally to have been conceived as a not-particularly-slow (though perhaps less maneuverable) fighter-bomber!)

I guess the game has these 99-cent microtransactions (is that the right word? I don’t know; I don’t mess with ’em) you can use to buy certain planes, but in our hypothetical GFFA porting, if you had to pay to unlock the Falcon or Moldy Crow or Outrider or whatever, you can bet geeks will pay it.

Seriously, it’s so disappointing when all the effort and money goes towards big-name titles that never wind up getting made, are full of bugs, or are just goofy…I would be willing to bet that I’m not the only potential user out there who’d love to play a no-nonsense Star Wars starfighter-dogfighting mobile game, and such an itch could be scratched with a simple bit of coding, likely to significant profit for the license-holder. Too bad software development isn’t my skillset…who’s up to the challenge? 🙂

I can only wish this was post was ‘sponsored content’, so if you appreciate my game recommendation, or would definitely play our hypothetical GFFA dogfighter title, let me know in the comments – or better yet, via ko-fi or with a small donation below! Thank you!