Snoopy Flying Ace

Fight the Red Baron...again!!

Posted 2 years ago By - Jay Acevedo

The last generation of consoles brought us Snoopy vs The Red Baron, a personal favorite of mine back in the Playstation 2 days. Developer Smart Bomb Interactive is back almost four years later with Snoopy Flying Ace for Xbox LIVE Arcade. Of course, I did not want to have my expectations set too high since it’s a downloadable game, but that effort was made was in vain. My love for the last aerial combat game featuring the Peanuts gang was ever-present, regardless how much I tried not to let it be a factor. In fact, Snoopy Flying Ace reminded me a lot more of my experience with the much-loved Xbox title Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge rather than Smart Bomb’s last Snoopy game thanks to its solid control scheme and great competitive multiplayer component.

Controlling your plane isn’t difficult at all. The left analog stick is used to move it around. Barrels, somersaults and other acrobatic maneuvers can be executed by flicking the right analog stick and each plane comes with both a primary and secondary firing weapon, switchable by pressing B. You will quickly get accustomed to the controls and you won’t have any difficulties at winning each of the levels featured in the single player mode, which despite its shallowness, acts as a big tutorial for the multiplayer mode (where you’ll log the majority of your flight hours anyway). Flying through rings, shoot down enemies, level complete. Once you beat the level, you go to the next which has the same objectives but only in a different setting. You can play them cooperatively with a friend via Xbox Live, but the real fun starts once you jump into the competitive multiplayer, where 15 other Aces will be waiting for you.

Aside from the standard dogfight, Snoopy Flying Ace also offers three additional modes: Capture the Flag, Dog Pile and Pigskin. The latter (which is my favorite) acts like a game of aerial football where you’ll need to pass the ball to a teammate and try to score while the defending team tries to shoot you down. However, the game does suffer from a few technical hiccups when playing on 10+ multiplayer player matches. Framerate drops and intermittent lag were noticed, but were luckily infrequent.

Despite being a pleasant game to play, my biggest gripe was towards the presentation. By name, you know that this game is based on Charles Schultz’ work, but it does a bad job at reminding you where the characters come from. Aside from the few Vince Guaraldi inspired tunes, there’s a serious lack of the classic Peanuts’ personality. Voice-acting is absent, there’s no cinematics in between missions, etc... In other words, after a few dogfights, you end up forgetting that it’s a Peanuts licensed game until you hear Snoopy’s distinctive laugh after shooting an enemy down.

Conclusion

Although I would have loved to have seen a stronger presence of the Peanuts cast, Snoopy Flying Ace is still hard to pass on. For $10, you are definitely getting something that hasn’t been offered on an Xbox console since Crimson Skies: an easy, straightforward and incredibly fun to play aerial combat game that you can enjoy for hours. Being the first of its genre on XBLA, nothing would please more now to see Crimson Skies 2 show up in my flight itenerary. A man can dream, right?