Birds of Steel (蒼の英雄 Birds of Steel, Ao no Eiyū: Birds of Steel) is a combat flight simulator video game created by Gaijin Entertainment and published by Konami. It was released in March 2012 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The game includes more than one hundred non-fictional planes, twenty historical missions, and hundreds of procedural missions over sixteen different locations, including Pearl Harbor and Wake Island. It has single player, four player cooperative, and online multiplayer modes. Birds of Steel provided the base work for Gaijin Entertainment's MMO game War Thunder. The game consists of three difficulty settings, which change the way planes are flown: Simplified, an arcade play style, Realistic, a mix between an arcade play style and a simulation play style, and lastly Simulator, in which the planes handle as closely to real life as possible. A.I. difficulty is not affected by the selected play style.
Reception
The Xbox 360 version received "generally favorable reviews", while the PlayStation 3 version received above-average reviews, according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. IGN Australia praised the graphics, sound, gameplay and lasting appeal but said that the presentation lacked a little spark. In Japan, Famitsu gave it a score of one nine, one eight, one seven, and one eight for a total of 32 out of 40.
