Project Wingman VR Review - A Straightforwardly Fun Virtual Reality Flying Game
A lot of the VR Flying games out there, at least those set in modern times, can seem pretty intimidating.
Sure there’s some great VR Flying Games out there with older aircraft set in the World Wars that are fun and accessible, but so far not so much for modern aircraft.
You might have heard of more intense VR flying simulator games like VTOL VR or DCS World that put you in the cockpit of a jet engine fighter, but the downside of those is that you have to invest a lot of time and energy to even know what you’re doing in them. They’re simulations and so take a lot of time and energy to learn. Even getting to the point where to get to fly jet engine aircraft in War Thunder VR would take a lot of time.
For those that want to feel like an awesome fighter pilot, king of the sky, splashing enemy bogies left and right, but don’t want to become an amatuer aerospace engineer just to know what you’re doing, there’s Project Wingman. It’s kind of like the Ace Combat franchise. Set in a fictional world, full of massive battles, and can be played with a controller.
A massive battle in Project Wingman VR
While not originally made for Virtual Reality, Project Wingman does feature very robust and functional Virtual Reality support, and so in this article I’ll tell you all about Project Wingman VR.
It’s easy to get started to play, and if you want to fulfil your Top Gun fantasies with a joystick or keyboard, it’s a great way to scratch that itch without having to dive into VR flying experiences that are more difficult to learn.
Even if you like more in depth flight simulators, Project Wingman is still a spectacle to see in Virtual Reality, and gives a lot of teeth clenching flying and shooting on top of that.
To find out exactly how and why Project Wingman VR does this, let’s dive into this Project Wingman VR review. Oh, and if you’re wondering how to run and play Project Wingman VR in PCVR using an Oculus Quest 3 or 2 headset, I’ll include a bit on that at the bottom most section of this article.
Project Wingman VR Review - The Gameplay and Story
In Project Wingman you are a mercenary, part of a large mercenary company called Sicario, and the world is much different from the one that we know.
A cataclysmic event destroyed a large section of the west coast of North America, and the superpower of the world is the Pacific Federation. The Federation controls the west coast of North America, and a majority of the Asia-Pacific region.
A mercenary company would be crazy to fight them, but when a country called Cascadia that controls the whole North American west coast decides to leave the Federation and is invaded for it, your mercenary group works for them and fights against the Federation.
Fighting on the ground and in the air. This game has some truly impressive visuals and battlefields
Things get much crazier from there, but that’s the basis of the plot of Project Wingman, and being an elite mercenary that fights in the largest conflicts of a war torn world is exactly the feeling that the gameplay of the game gives you.
Project Wingman VR is a flight simulator, but as I’ve mentioned it’s not one caught up on realism or restraint. Every mission in the Campaign is a huge battle with tens if not hundreds of units in the sky and on the ground, both allied and enemy.
You’re a pilot, and you and your aircraft are capable of dishing out and receiving a ton of punishment. Throughout the Campaign you’ll get access to a huge roster of planes in a variety of roles to fly with a variety of stats like maximum speed and turning rate.
Not to mention a huge variety of different weapons, though at the very least you’ll always have your guns and basic short range, slow missiles to fall back on.
VR Project Wingman has a lot of different aircraft that you can unlock as you progress
You can always fire your guns with your primary fire button, and select the different missiles, bombs, and whatever other ordinance you’re carrying to fire with the secondary fire button. Missiles need to lock on to a target in front of you, and that’s the basics of how to play Project Wingman VR. The rest comes down to how you fly.
What makes Project Wingman VR so much fun is how easy it is to pick up and play like an expert pilot. The movement controls are straightforward and easy to grasp, look up, down, side to side, or roll.
Locking on with your missiles is also easy, and so is switching between targets with a single button. There will be a lot of different targets too, from ground based defenses and buildings to ships to enemy fighters of various skill. From the very first campaign mission you’re blowing up PT Boats and AA defenses with missiles, and then switching gears to take down enemy fighters.
Your opponents are numerous, sure, but they’re more fragile and less intelligent than even a new player, at least at first. You’ll find yourself up against a ton of different challenges in this game from massive airships to enemy mercenary pilots who are much faster and more skilled than your average opponent.
The science fiction elements of the game like gigantic Airships and Railguns are also impressive visually and give interesting gameplay challenges
That’s not to say that VR Project Wingman is easy. It gets harder as you progress through the Campaign, but your experience will make up for that. Each battle is massive, and becomes a thrill ride of bouncing from one target to another, turning hard through the air, launching missiles, and turning out again to evade a fighter on your tail.
That’s the essence of what makes this flying game so great in VR or the flatscreen. It’s fast paced and action oriented. Without a million controls and screens to worry about in your cockpit you can focus on chasing down enemies, or evading them, and getting a record number of kills. Zooming around the air and blowing this up feels easy and good.
You can quickly get the hang of the controls, though there doesn’t seem to be a tutorial of any kind and so you’ll have to read the keybinds in the settings menu. Luckily there aren’t too many. Still, a tutorial would have been nice. There are occasionally prompts on the screen during the first few missions, but not often enough to teach you all of the controls without having to look at the Settings.
The settings menu after setting up a joystick. An Xbox controller or gamepad will work by default
It’s possible to play this game with full control and competency in a number of ways. A keyboard and mouse will do, but you can also use an Xbox controller or other gamepad, or even a joystick (aka HOTAS). The main menu also has a neat feature where your cursor will follow where you are looking, so there’s no need to grab your mouse for the menus.
Using the joystick does involve some messing around with the keybinds to get it working, but you can play this game easily with whichever type of controller you prefer. They’re all fun and work well.
Oh, and there’s more ways to play VR Project Wingman than just the main Campaign. Though I have to say that the Campaign is fantastic and offers a decent story about a world in conflict and what the conflict does to the world. Not to mention that each mission is pretty fantastic and gives you a lot of different enemies and challenges to overcome.
Each campaign mission has a detailed briefing and conveys some of Project Wingman’s story
Well if you’re tired of the Campaign there’s also Conquest mode. While the Campaign is finite, Conquest mode generates sorties and battles for you to fight through across a map of Cascadia.
In Conquest you fight in these generated battles and accumulate money for more wingmen and equipment. Though as your enemy loses more and more to you they will send stronger forces to try and stop you. It’s an interesting mode that adds a lot of replayability to the game, and gives you a chance to experiment with more planes that you might have missed in the Campaign.
Though if you’re wondering whether Project Wingman VR has a Multiplayer mode so that you can play against others or your friends, well unfortunately it doesn’t. If you want a more Multiplayer oriented VR flight simulator with modern planes then look into VTOL VR, though that game requires a lot more learning than Project Wingman does, it does at least have a tutorial.
Project Wingman VR Review - The Look and Feel of Virtual Reality
The first thing you should consider when thinking of playing any Virtual Reality flying game is how much you’re prone to motion sickness.
That’s because more than any other genre of game on the Quest, flying games tend to give people motion sickness more than any other.
One of the biggest draws of VR in any flying game, Project Wingman included, is the ability to look around your cockpit and at the skies around you with total freedom by just moving your head around.
It’s truly awesome, and gives you a big gameplay advantage because of how easily you can keep your eye on other planes in the sky by looking at them through the top or sides of your cockpit while you’re flying past. This is very fun and very crucial in dogfights, which there are a lot of in Project Wingman VR.
Firing a missile at a ground target
Unfortunately it’s also really easy to give yourself motion sickness this way.
There are definitely ways to mitigate motion sickness while VR gaming, but if you haven’t tried high tensity flying in Virtual Reality before then keep in mind that you might have to just play in short sessions for a while until you get used to it.
With that disclaimer out of the way, wow does Project Wingman look fantastic in VR. It’s an older game and so has that sort of fuzziness to the edges of objects that a lot of older VR games have, but WOW does it still look good.
Unlike a lot of other older VR ports, Project Wingman looks great in Virtual Reality, and runs pretty well.
Not to mention the environments. They look absolutely stunning. From idyllic hillsides blasted with bomb craters and fires, to gigantic cityscapes covered in the fog of war. Project Wingman VR is a stunning display of graphical fidelity, and just like all games that include Virtual Reality, it looks even better up close in VR.
Just look at that city far below the clouds
The same goes for the feeling of the game. VR puts you right in the cockpit of your jet, and looking at your cockpit and all of the things beyond it by moving your actual head arounds really serves to make you feel much more present in the world of the game.
Though if you were wondering if you could use the third person or non cockpit views in VR, then you might be disappointed to hear that VR only allows you to play in the cockpit view. Though to be honest that would probably be the best way to play VR Project Wingman anyway.
Boom
While Project Wingman VR can be a little difficult to run with higher graphical settings on older, weaker computers, it is truly a spectacle. Each mission to undertake presents you with a battlefield full of allies and enemies in the air and on the ground.
The trails of missiles criss cross through the sky, explosions balloon from the earth with every successful missile strike. The music is upbeat, and the banter of your mercenary colleagues, enemies, and allies, is a pleasant reminder that you’re one pilot in a huge conflict.
The banter of your fellow pilots isn’t constant, but comes often enough to feel friendly
For all of these reasons Project Wingman VR is highly recommended if you want a fast and fun game that lets you be a fighter pilot and dominate the skies in massive AI battles. If you want a more Multiplayer focused or slower paced game then maybe try VTOL VR, but even for people who are used to more simulator focused VR flying games, Project Wingman is a blast. It’s a lot of fun to zoom from target to target firing missiles all the way. That’s the essence of what makes this Virtual Reality game awesome, the thrill and speed of it.
Even if you already play more in depth VR Flying Games, Project Wingman offers a more fast paced and action oriented experience than the more simulator focused games. If you just want to hop into a game and fire some missiles then this is definitely one you should check out.
If you’re interested in playing Project Wingman VR, here’s how.
How To Play Project Wingman VR
So if you’re interested in playing Project Wingman in Virtual Reality, here’s how you do that.
As far as which VR headset you’ll need, any that can connect to a PC is fine. If you’re using an Oculus Quest VR headset then you’ll have to connect it to your PC, since Project Wingman VR is a PCVR game and not available as a standalone game on the Quest store.
If you’ve played PCVR games before on your PC, then running Project Wingman VR is the same as any other PCVR game you’d play through Steam.
Though no matter how you get it running keep in mind that you might get a prompt the first time you run the game via Steam VR about what controller profile to use for your touch controllers. Don’t worry about that, since there’s no reason to use touch controllers in this VR game.
As long as Steam VR is running and detects your headset the game will automatically run in Virtual Reality mode. After loading is finished you will see the main menu in your headset.
Fighting enemy ships during a massive thunderstorm
So setup is really easy if you’ve ever played a PCVR game before.
If you’re using an Oculus Quest 2 or Oculus Quest 3 and haven’t run a PCVR game on your headset before then this guide for running VTOL VR on a Quest device should be helpful, but instead of running VTOL VR when you’re in Steam VR just run Project Wingman instead.
Since Project Wingman is a Steam game you can also use Steam Link to play it on a Quest device. You might find that it runs better through Steam Link than Oculus Airlink or Virtual Desktop.
Anyhow that’s all for this Project Wingman VR Review. This game is an absolute blast to play in Virtual Reality. It starts strong and spectacular and just became stronger and more spectacular over time. If you want to be a master pilot and fight in huge aerial battles then this is definitely a game you should try.
