Set during the World War II era, the Americans and British have teamed to form the Allied coalition, while the Germans and Japanese have countered by creating the Axis of power. Iron Aces follows the battles between four islands, each belonging to one of the four military powers: Blocken to Germany, Yamato to Japan, Trincer to Britain and Valiant to America. The game starts out with the British coming to the realization that it won’t be long before the Germans press through their territory, and call to the Americans for their help. Just as the best of America’s pilots are arriving at Trincer, all hell breaks loose.

Since operating a complex piece of aerial machinery isn’t a simple task, it usually takes a good portion of a keyboard and mouse/joystick combination on a PC to accomplish a realistic feat. With this taken into account, for Iron Aces, Marionette has had to tone things down a bit to work with the Dreamcast’s controller, but thankfully, not excessively. You won’t have to worry about your engine stalling when pulling off insane maneuvers to avoid enemy gunfire; the game eliminates that in exchange for an emphasis on proper battle strategy. Gunning the engine and heading straight at enemies kamikaze style won’t work (most of the time, at least), and it actually becomes important to pay attention who you’re battling, since sometimes enemies will start heading toward the outskirts of the battle field to lead you away from where the rest of them are located.

It doesn’t take long to become used to Iron Aces’ control scheme; it’s relatively simple. X and A are used to increase the plane’s speed, B fires the machinegun, Y and B at the same time drop bombs, etc. The one aspect that had me punching the ground, though, was when it came to bombing targets. While it might be easy to drop the bombs, making them impact a specific target is insanely difficult. You have to take into account what altitude you’re at (dropping the bomb from two high can result in it exploding prematurely), in addition to the speed the plane is moving at. Real? Yes. Fun? No. The result is a load of complexities that have to be thought about, while at the same time avoiding anti-aircraft fire and other fighter pilots. It can take numerous attempts to take out a single target with a bomb, and things could have been made infinitely easier if there was an “under-the-plane” camera angle.

Almost as annoying as the bombing runs is the game switching over to a “live” random camera view of the action after blowing up an enemy fighter. If it was simply a replay of what you had just accomplished it would make more sense, but all of it’s happening in real-time, so it becomes a problem to grab hold of how you’re supposed to control the aircraft. You have to press up on the directional pad to switch back to the normal first-person view, and it didn’t take long for me to become ticked off when I ran into the ground, fell into the water or collided with another plane because I couldn’t orient myself after the camera went out of control.

Unlike Starlancer, which had some fantastic graphics, Marionette has simply pulled together a satisfactory visual appeal for Iron Aces. In particular, the night missions look beautiful when viewed from a high altitude (when close to the ground the textures become blurred), and the searchlights panning the sky are a good touch. Otherwise, there wasn’t really a time where slowdown became an issue during the game, but then again, the only taxing thing to the game is the far draw distance. You almost never catch a glimpse of the plane models for more than a split second, if that, and the models for the ships and buildings are bland, at best.

If you’re looking for some hardcore World War II aerial action on your Dreamcast, Iron Aces should fit the bill. It isn’t the prettiest thing out there, and there are a few rough edges here and there when it comes to bombing and the like, but otherwise, it’s a decent simulation that’ll have you cheering as you attack Japanese and German bases.