The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces takes a lot of inspiration from mission-driven flight games such as Wing Commander, the various X-Wing series games, and obviously Ace Combat (it was even developed by the same team that did the Ace Combat series), though its theme is one closer to something like the 1950s with fighter planes that have much in common with World War 2 era craft. While it does have some anime elements to it, The Sky Crawlers is a mostly serious flight game and expects to be viewed in that light. Fortunately it makes excellent use of the Wii’s motion controls, and combined with a competent plot it should keep you entertained from start to finish... the only problem is that the ’finish’ part comes all too soon.

This game gets off to a terrible start with a tutorial that is badly paced and frustrating, yet necessary; its default controls aren’t quite as detailed as a hardcore flight sim, but they do have enough nuance to them that you’ll need to sit down and learn them. The primary way to play is using the Wiimote in your left hand as an aircraft throttle, while the Nunchuk is in your other hand as a flight stick; it’s strange only because it’s reversed from normal Wii controls, and you’ll get used to it quickly. While some aspects of flight are done with realistic controls, The Sky Crawlers also lets you use shortcut commands for some fancy maneuvers such as barrel rolls, Immelman Turns, and so on; flick your Nunchuk’s analog stick in the direction mapped to that maneuver, press A, and you’ll automatically do the chosen move. You can also do "TMC" maneuvers by managing to stay close to an enemy for a while, and these moves will put you in a superior shooting position.

Fortunately the tutorial is short and things improve from there. Most of the game’s nearly twenty missions focus on dogfighting various enemies while working with your AI allies (who are amazingly enough occasionally useful), though a few of them get more creative. One particularly interesting mission involves a synchronized bombing run on four targets; you and your AI squad split up to hit four places at the same time while fighting heavy cross-winds and an altitude limit to avoid being detected; it’s actually pretty enjoyable. Thus while most missions fall into the "Hulk Smash!" mentality, a few do let you flex other flying skills beyond straight dogfighting, and it works quite well. Each stage takes anywhere from five to fifteen minutes to complete, and that works fine; the only problem is the low number of stages.

Each mission is followed by storyline segments that are reasonably interesting; it’s not the most inspiring plot, but the anime cutscenes do a decent job giving you a reason to keep playing and caring about the events that unfold while you fight. These segments (as well as in-mission dialogue) are given a full English dub, though the acting quality ranges from being pretty good to absolutely terrible and one character suffers from literal translation. Her lines probably made plenty of sense in their original Japanese, but various rapid-fire shouts along the lines of "There! Not yet!? Evading!" and so on just render into spoken English very clumsily indeed. Still, the sounds of dogfighting, guns firing, engines and propellers working, and so on all do a great job of making up for the erratic voice acting quality and the soundtrack is excellent, always putting you in the right mood for the situation at hand.

The back of the box claims this is a two player game, but that’s really stretching the truth. It was designed as a single-player game, and there is little documentation about how a second person would play it. It turns out that once you’re in-mission, you just have the second player get out their Wiimote and press A; they then gain an on-screen cursor that lets them shoot at anything they can point at, just like Super Mario Galaxy. this isn’t particularly satisfying since the second player’s gun is weak (not useless, but definitely weak) and it makes no sense given these planes are meant to be at least semi-realistic yet no turret or seat for this gunner is visible in most of the craft you can play with. So while there is technically a multiplayer mode, it’s just short of pointless.

Ultimately, The Sky Crawlers is a competent mission-driven flight game and does the core of the experience well. It retails for around $30, significantly less than most Wii retail titles, but this is partially because The Sky Crawlers is a very short game. Each of the seventeen main stages (there is also an unlockable one pitting you against a hundred enemy planes) takes about five to fifteen minutes to beat, and the anime cutscenes between each stage are also about three to five minutes long. That puts The Sky Crawlers somewhere in the four to six hour range, which is pretty steep for the thirty dollars this game is priced at. This leaves me in the strange position of rating a game that I thoroughly enjoyed yet have trouble justifying a recommendation for purchase. It’s a perfect choice for a rental, and genre fans may also be willing to pay a premium for roughly six hours of solid mission-based flight gaming, but others may want to think really hard before buying this one, it’s definitely fun but also far too short.