Winter 2013 WWII Games

By Joseph Luster We’re dialing things back a few years this time around by diving into Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol, which puts World War I dogfighting in the palm of your hands on the iOS device of your choosing. Ace Patrol is a deceptively simple turn-based strategy game that offers up plenty of excitement for both newcomers and vets of the genre, and best of all, the base game is free for anyone to download and try out. Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol Strategy games can be mightily imposing to the uninitiated, but Ace Patrol does a great job of concisely teaching players the basics of its mechanics, while providing plenty of room to grow and develop more advanced strategies. Combat is set on a battlefield of hexagonal grids, and early missions have you testing the skies out with a single plane. Touch-based controls are simple enough without need for too much explanation in the tutorial. Tapping arrow buttons causes your unit to maneuver in that direction—banking left or right, rising in altitude, or even pulling off expert moves like the Immelmann turn—and the name of the game is getting within range of the enemy and blasting them out of the clouds. The single moves might seem sluggish at first, but the pace of Ace Patrol is pretty spot-on. As you advance, missions will have you controlling up to four planes at once in your squad, but it never gets to the point of being overwhelming, and you never need to zoom out for a more expansive view of the battle area. Missions are k