When you see an airplane combat game that touts full HOTAS support, head tracking, and VR integration, you expect something pretty hardcore; Project Wingman is not, nor does it attempt to be. It's more like a modern-day "Top Gun" game, where you step into the cockpit of a jet as a superhuman mercenary ace and engage in some real dogfight action. While there is plenty of detail and variation in the various aircraft and loadouts, it is certainly not a simulation in the sense of the IL-2 Sturmovik type of game I grew up with.

The controls are very arcadey, even without the beginner mode enabled. It is possible to come to an almost complete stop in mid-air and land on a runway about 100 feet away, barely kissing the ground with the wheels at the last moment. Bending hairpin curves in any direction while flying at several hundred miles per hour will not bother you or your aircraft. It is possible to fly upside down or sideways at top speed and maintain a constant altitude more or less indefinitely. If you lose too much speed, you may stall, but even that is fairly forgiving and easily recovered. Accuracy is relative, and even a small ground target, such as a tank, will take full damage as long as you land a high-fire round in its vicinity.

This is not to say that Project Wingman is not interesting. Sometimes it's tempting to swoop in on a bandit and take him out with a well-placed full-auto burst, or to swoop down over a geothermal power plant and carpet it with bombs before switching to an external camera for some Hollywood pyrotechnics. I want a radio voice in my ear shouting, "They're my six." It's just an atmosphere. I don't care who is yelling, what is the number 6, or where the "number 6" is. I'm just vibing.

If you're in the mood to fly your jets fast and blow shit up without worrying about crap like structural integrity or blackouts, Project Wingman has you covered. Mouse and keyboard controls, no matter how fine-tuned, are just too touchy. I had the best experience with my trusty Logitech Extreme 3D Pro stick, but the controls on my old Xbox 360 controller work just fine. The throttle controls are a bit cumbersome, as you have to hold down the shoulder button to move the throttle up and down at a constant speed, but they are definitely playable.

Everything looks incredibly beautiful, from the cockpit interior to the environment to the volume clouds. On my RTX 2060 Super, I was able to cruise at over 60 fps at maximum settings even with all the things going on. Each exaggerated explosion is so satisfyingly loud that you can almost feel it in your surround sound headphones as the flames and smoldering debris confirm your kill with a pleasant "boom" bass sound. The canopy is filled with moisture and receives sunlight in a realistic manner. The terrain looks gorgeous, whether over a frozen taiga or a futuristic metropolis. The aircraft itself is also made with great attention to detail.

A variety of real-world inspired aircraft help keep things interesting, and each of the 21 campaign missions encourages you to pick the right tool for the job. If you are supporting ground troops in a fierce battle, you may want to bring along an air-to-ground attack aircraft modeled after the A-10. If air-to-air combat is the main focus, a dogfighter modeled after the MiG-29 may be more suitable. The types of weapons they specialize in vary widely, from tracked missiles that require continuous targeting but are nearly impossible to evade, to ground-targeted cluster bombs when the ground needs to be burned to the ground. However, the hangar UI for building these loadouts is very clunky, unintuitive, and too restrictive about which weapons can be attached to which hardpoints.

The 21-mission campaign is an interesting war story in a future Earth ravaged by natural disasters, where the West Coast of the United States is physically seceding from the rest of the continent and attempting to secede politically as well. You fight for the downtrodden Cascadians against the imperialistic Union and try to help them win their independence so they can enjoy garage rock and voodoo donuts in peace. Most of the characters are war movie stereotypes, and the arc is somewhat predictable, but there are some neat plot twists.

However, things can get a bit repetitive, and the increasingly raucous sci-fi super enemies add some much-needed variety, but can also be frustrating. For example, the flying fortresses that you come to encounter in a few missions require you to destroy all hardpoints before being shot down. No matter how much firepower you throw at the aircraft, it seems to be invincible until all the AA guns are destroyed. This is the most game-changing part of Project Wingman, and it has ruined an already shaky illusion for me. And regardless of the objective, I spent most of my time in every mission chasing down enemy fighters. This was because the AI wingman didn't seem that capable of keeping enemy fighters away from me while I was chasing down priority targets.

What might bring me back to Project Wingman is the open-ended Conquest mode. You start out with just a couple of basic jets and then have to go on missions to acquire new hardware and hire additional pilots. As you add more pilots, you'll conquer maps along the coast and aim for the final showdown. Managing resources is challenging and scratches a strategic itch not present in the campaign.

I spent a lot of time lamenting what Project Wingman doesn't have. Better physics, smarter AI allies, less predictable characters, more varied objectives, etc. Better physics, smarter AI allies, less predictable characters, more varied targets, etc. But I also had fun zooming around, painting targets, and banking hard to avoid missile locks. It's like a popcorn action movie in game form, and consistently enjoyable for the same reasons those movies are. I'm sure I'd puke on the joystick in VR due to its disregard for Newton's laws and human biology, but in good old 1080p, my heart was pounding and lunch was on the way.