Kombo's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What the Game's About
Heroes Over Europe takes to the sky in a high-flying adventure centered around the air battles of World War II. In period-based aircraft, you gun for the Nazi Luftwaffe as you defend Allied positions in Europe. Arcade gameplay rules the sky rather than an accurate simulation of flight rules and maneuvers. You start off with a Spitfire but end up with over 40 Allied and German planes that can be used for the missions or online.

What's Hot
Once you start the propeller, the action starts. There isn't really a slow incline leading into action; HOE starts you in the thick of war. The ability to get into the action with the press of only a few buttons is nice and allows you to further explore the game mechanics and its offerings. The skies are filled with bombers and fighter planes so it works to HOE's benefit that you get to the action as quickly as humanly possible.

Those offerings would be the arcade-like ways you dogfight and annihilate enemy planes out of the sky. The basic method involves you leading your shot so the bullets will hit the aircraft rather than pierce nothing but air. HOE allows you to gain the upper hand and dive bomb formations for instant kills. It's a quick, easy and easy to learn way of doing your business, but if you want to use a little more style, HOE implemented a system to accomplish just that.

The Ace Kill is one of the best features of the game. With a quick trigger finger and a spirited chase, you can lock enemy planes into your sights and unleash a bullet time mode that allows you to snipe and destroy vital parts of an airplane. You can attack the pilot, engines or ammo boxes since you are given an enhanced view of the situation thanks to bright glowing yellow targets. The combat is what keeps HOE entertaining throughout the game thanks to the different methods of attack in addition to the intense on-screen action.



What's Not
In terms of gameplay variety and mission diversity, you basically see everything in the first hour. The action isn't all that varied and each mission segment seems to blend together in all the houses in the suburbs are beige in a way that you can't really discern, or care, what part of the game you are playing. There are attempts to spice up the game through cut-scenes or chit-chat in the plane cockpits, but it all falls flat like wounded geese in the sky. The real reason to play the game is for the exciting dogfights, lack of variety be darned.

HOE is a game completed too early. It is at the point where there are so many ways it could have gone and made up for the lost opportunities to expand upon itself. The end result is a game that does one thing very well but the rest is just average or serviceable. The ground environment is rather bland with few details, the dramatic parts of the game fall short since the script is weak and fails to bring you into the conflict in a meaningful way and the online mode is a nice gesture but doesn't bring the same excitement as the single-player experience since you are limited to 16 player matches. The lost potential resonates the more time you spend with the game.

Final Word
HOE is a game with a lot of unrealized potential. The core of the game is fun enough that it warrants a rental and from there you'll know if the game and the online mode are for you or not. With more time and more polish, this could have been a hit but somewhere down the development line, the game misfires and falls short of something that had the potential to be better.