It's great watching your pilot working the controls, or the shadows cast by your plane move back and forth across the dials. The planes themselves are richly detailed, and the cockpits in particular have been lavished with attention. Fortunately Birds of Steel's visuals thoroughly impress, and the audio is equally excellent. Of course, Birds of Steel's lengthy roster of aircraft would amount to zip if the presentation and gameplay left players wanting.

It may have been called a Boomerang, but it didn't always come back. Birds of Steel features an exhaustive list packed with some of the most famous planes to ever plunge through the sky, but it's inclusions like the Boomerang (and various others only ardent air combat buffs will even recognise) that best illustrate Gaijin's broad appreciation for Second World War aviation. Despite the fact only 250 of them were built (and on the only occasion a Boomerang had a chance to down a Japanese plane its guns jammed) Moscow-based Gaijin recognised the first combat aircraft designed and built in Australia as a WWII curio and included it in the game. Case in point: the team at Gaijin didn't need to ensure they included a CAC Boomerang – it's not going to sell them that many more copies of the game – but they did. Gaijin could've made do with fewer, but it chose not to. There are just over 100 classic planes in Birds of Steel. Birds of Steel feels very much like the aerial equivalent. These games have become more than simple driving games they're interactive odes to global car culture.

You see a similar phenomenon in the same way games like Forza Motorsport or Gran Turismo seem to almost fetishise cars. Rather, it's a game built for vintage flight fans by vintage flight fans. It isn't a game built to capitalise on whatever the latest trend in gaming is and it isn't a game built to break records. Birds of Steel isn't a game built to set charts alight around the world. And you can see the same sort of passion in Gaijin's Birds of Steel. It's not just cash that puts these old warbirds back together it's passion. You need to feel a certain way about antique aircraft to devote these kinds of resources and this kind of energy to restoring 70-year-old lumps of scrap into flying condition.

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