Snoopy vs. The Red Baron
It's like Ace Combat Lite -- light on challenge, light on replay value.
Published: November 4, 2006
Some of the "rewards" in the game are fairly questionable. The balloons, near as I can tell, don't actually get you anything, they're just sort of there to add something to the final end level ranking. Likewise, the letters in each level are there to help spell out other Peanuts characters, but once you collect a full name, you'll still have to pay a rather hefty sum to unlock that player and their plane. Given that the money in the game is fairly scarce (especially later on when upgrades to the stunt meter, machine guns and total health start to get a little pricey).
Should the single-player missions get a little tiring (the actual missions aren't terribly tough, but the boss fights can be a little aggravating), there are some basic multiplayer modes, but they're all more or less different flavors of the same basic dogfighting modes -- though you can at least adjust some basic options to make the matches a little longer. Flying Aces and King of the Skies take the basic deathmatch gameplay of Top Dog Mode and inject a timer/score counter or a single life, respectively, into the normal dogfights.
Though at first it seems like SmartBomb has created a huge world to fly around in, most of the objectives in levels keep the player on a fairly short leash, and all of the unlocks are more or less along the mission path. Later on, you'll have to go exploring a little more to find all the bonuses, but for the most part your particular slice of the level is where you'll stay. On the plus side, it means the levels can be rather nicely pockmarked with little houses and bits of extra geometry and by and large the game holds a very respectable framerate with some minor hitches here and there with a lot of activity on the screen, though luckily, they don't hurt the game too much when the pop up.
The audio, on the other hand, does. My earlier fears that the game's child voice actors were final when we previewed the game have not been allayed; the training missions will drive you up a wall if you're sensitive to that sort of thing, but luckily the rest of the cutscenes (which attempt to render the Peanuts characters in 3D and end up looking a little weird sometimes -- though that's more the fact that I'm used to seeing them in 2D) are voiced by characters that sound a little closer to the actors that played them in the cartoon.
The rest of the effects are fairly simple; light music loops help give the game a semi-dramatic tone, but the rest of the punchy little explosions, engine drones and laughs from Snoopy all help the game maintain its charm while you're in missions. In fact, Snoopy's trademark giggle is almost enough to throw a wave of nostalgia at older gamers in and of itself.
1,000 words all to basically tell you this: Snoopy vs. the Red Baron is better than licensed games ought to be. It's better than a kids game ought to be. Best of all, it's completely playable by older gamers (like, say, parents, maybe?), though it obviously doesn't have the depth of something like Ace Combat, it's still more than entertaining enough to be recommended for the $30 or so entry price.
If you're an older gamer with kids or siblings around that you'd like to play with, here ya go. If you're flying solo, however, and you tip the scales in double-digit age, you'll probably want to aim for something a little deeper.
