Early on in the design process, a decision was obviously made to sacrifice realism for fun whenever necessary. This is a formula that has served Larry Holland and Totally Games well over the past decade or so. They’ve been responsible for a slew of super fun (if not incredibly realistic) flying games, from Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe to TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance. The formula works once again here - take a bunch of cool flying machines, make them easy and fun to pilot, drop them into a great story with some interesting characters and you have another winner.

In this case, the cool flying machines are the classic war planes of WWII. In SWON you get to pilot a ton of great Allied, German and Japanese planes including the P-51 Mustang, Spitfire, BF-109 and all of the classics you’d expect. You also get to jump into the cockpit of some very cool experimental aircraft like the XP-55 and XP-56, with their odd rear-mounted engines, the Me 262 jet fighter, and the XF5U-1 Flying Pancake. All the planes have a unique feel and you’ll quickly come to appreciate their strengths and weaknesses as you put them to the test.

You play James Chase, a hot-shot American pilot who finds himself part of an top-secret, international squadron of the world’s best pilots known as the Battlehawks. As you prove your worth to this elite group you find yourself flying pivotal missions in Britain, France, North Africa, the Pacific Theater and the Eastern Front. The story is told in a PBS-like documentary style with lots of newsreel clips and old photos. The use of actual PBS voice actor Will Lyman really adds to the believability here and the story segments are nicely done and fun to watch.

Aside from the main storyline there are a number of challenge stages that become available as you complete the main missions. These challenges help to train you for the upcoming battles and give you the opportunity to earn new aircraft or upgrades for your current hanger of planes. Upgrades mainly consist of improved guns, engines and armor, and trust me - you’ll need them. You’ll also gain access to a wide assortment of bombs, missiles and torpedoes - some familiar, and some experimental, to help with the tougher missions.

A split-screen multiplayer mode is also available. You can dogfight with another player or join forces for some co-op action. Both are a lot of fun, especially the co-op games. Unfortunately there aren’t many of them and it would have been nice to play through the entire single-player game in co-op mode. There is no multiplayer support for Xbox Live - which is odd. I’m not sure why LucasArts decided to leave this out, but I am sure it’s going to hurt sales, particularly with the excellent Crimson Skies tearing it up online.

The controls and interface have been designed from the ground up to be easy and fun rather than cumbersome and authentic. The left control stick guides your plane, automatically banking for you as you turn and constantly auto-leveling so that you never end up upside-down or sideways for very long. If you feel you’d like a little more control, you can switch from the default, “arcade” setting to the “advanced” setting. This allows you to use the right control stick to control your own rudder and disables the auto-leveling feature. Although still a long way from being a flight-sim, this does make the flying a little more realistic and challenging. It also allows for some more complex maneuvering not possible in the arcade mode.

The game is played from a third-person perspective with the option to switch to first-person, although there’s no advantage to doing so. For bombing missions you can switch the camera to an overhead view that makes lining up your shots a lot easier.

A very cool feature of SWON is the ability to manipulate time. If you’re on a long flight to a distant target you can speed up time to get back in the action more quickly - a common feature in most flying games. In SWON, you can also go into a sort of “bullet time” mode where time slows down, giving you plenty of time to line up even the trickiest opponent. It’s a blast to use and I found myself turning it on more and more often as the game progressed. The only problem with this feature is that there is no limit to its use - you could play the entire game in bullet time mode if you wished. It would have been nice to see it rationed out to force you to use it strategically when you really needed it.

The HUD (which can be disabled) makes it easy for you to find the closest enemy and get it in your sights. Once another unit is targeted you can see both its distance from you and it’s current health and a red target shows you how far ahead you’ll have to lead your shots to ensure a hit. You can also easily identify all friendly and enemy units both in the air and on the ground, including friendly airbases where you can land to get a fresh supply of ammo and health.

When bombing ground targets you have a yellow target on the ground to help you nail your shots. Depending on your angle to the ground this target will grow and shrink in size. The smaller the size, the greater the accuracy. The best way to bomb enemies is to fly up a few hundred feet, then dive directly down at them - at this point your bomb target shrinks down to almost nothing and your bombs fall with deadly precision. A cool feature while bombing is the bomb-cam. If you hold down the bomb button, the camera will follow the bomb as it falls - very cool.

Graphically, SWON gets the job done. The plane models look fantastic right down to moving ailerons, rudders and landing gear. The explosions, effects and environments are well done as well - nothing groundbreaking, but certainly pretty enough. The sound, in typical LucasArts fashion, is amazing. Airplane engines, gunfire and explosions all sound great. The voice acting is solid, including the chatter on your radio. It’s nice to hear the enemy pilots actually speaking German and Japanese instead of accented English. The music is stirring and powerful - some of the best you’ll find in any game. This isn’t surprising considering that LucasArts signed up ace composer Michael Giacchino, whose credits include the beautifully scored Medal of Honor and Call of Duty.

Secret Weapons Over Normandy is an excellent action-flying game. Its simple, intuitive controls, solid storytelling and high production values deliver a fun WWII shooter in the clouds - think Call of Duty with wings. The only real disappointments are the lack of online multiplayer and a more robust co-operative mode. The bottom line is that anyone looking for fun, polished, single-player aerial combat should lock their sights on SWON.