Project Wingman

Project Wingman sits firmly on the arcade side of the flight-action genre rather than the simulator one: you pick up a fighter, the controls are immediately legible, and the focus is on choreographed setpiece combat rather than checklists and trim. The setting is an alternate-history Earth, and the missions take you across the Bering Strait, the Yellowstone magma fields, the Pacific Northwest and the scarred middle of a world that's clearly been through something.

Over twenty aircraft and forty weapons sit in the hangar, and the opposition often outclasses you on paper — railguns, geothermally powered armaments and walking mechanized fortresses are all entries on the threat list. The single-player campaign carries a real narrative, but the standout structure is Conquest mode: a roguelike-flavored territory loop where you build a mercenary army between missions, take on increasingly punishing waves, and adjust difficulty through stackable modifiers.

The tech sits comfortably above its genre weight class. TrueSKY drives the 3D volumetric clouds, HOTAS controllers work natively with DirectInput peripherals and custom axis curves, and VR support puts the camera inside the cockpit with full head-tracking. None of that papers over the fact that the core appeal is straightforward: take off, shoot down impossible numbers of things, land if you can.