Aeronautica Imperialis: Flight Command is Binary Planets’ digital conversion of the Games Workshop tabletop game of the same name minus subtitle. For once, we haven’t played the tabletop original but Flight Command certainly looks the part.

Air battles are the main draw of Flight Command, Ork and Imperial planes exploding each other into thousands of tiny bits. Combat takes place in five second chunks with both sides taking their turns simultaneously; you first plan out your manoeuvres, set which weapons are armed, and commit to the action. Five brief seconds then play out over and over again from the different perspectives of your units so you can get an idea of what just happened.

It isn’t as simple as pointing your plane at the enemy and hoping you land a shot once you’re in range, though that sometimes works, but rather you have a lot to consider: Where the enemy will be, what they’ll do, air speed, altitude, remaining ammunition, where other friendly planes will be, and whether your pilot is about to pass out from pulling yet another high-G move. Typically, collisions will be your greatest enemy when playing Imperials – going for a risky head-on shot or close pass will often result in an Ork plane choosing to ram yours out of the sky like an outmatched War Thunder player.

Your pilots can pull a variety of moves to get into and out of danger too. Most useful are the immelman (reversing direction while gaining or losing altitude) and crash dive (a sudden and drastic dive to low altitude) which between them can keep your planes in the fight longer than just turning normally. You have other moves too; the sideslip allows you to move to the side a little, without changing direction, like changing lanes on a motorway. Meanwhile the final manoeuvre type is spiral turns which we honestly just never found a use for.

Throwing a futuristic jet fighter through its paces however results in inflicting g-forces on your pilot who will accumulate points until they pass out for a turn. You can avoid this by relaxing your manoeuvring to allow the pilot time to recover but if you’re maintaining good positioning you’ll typically only need one, maybe two, sharp turns at a time so it rarely becomes a serious issue. On the other hand, if you’re losing and the enemy has the numbers advantage it can be a very big problem as you’re forced to subject your pilots to much more stress to keep them alive. There’s always retreat – accomplished by reaching the border of the battle map and crossing it, but that’s not much use in a one-shot scenario mission.

Scenarios can be played online or versus the AI but we were limited to the latter. These scenarios give you set objectives and can be played from either side of the conflict. Completing some of them even unlocks rewards. Typically, they’re not too difficult but the ability to play both factions opens up some much welcomed variety. Some of the more engaging moments come from mission where you’re tasked to rescue ground troops – destroying AAA weapons on the ground before landing fragile transports to pick up the troops while Ork fighters try to make a hole in your air cover and get a shot off at the sitting ducks on the ground.

Unfortunately, as a video game Aeronautica Imperialis: Flight Command suffers from a lack of depth and repetitiveness. That isn’t to say the core game is bad, it’s just not very engaging in the long term. Facing off against another player is more engaging, as you’d expect for a tabletop game, but against the AI it feels like a lot of the excitement is lacking. We blew through the available missions and don’t really feel the need to go back.

Part of this is also down to the bland terrain you’ll be fighting over. Inevitably a vaguely flat bit of land between some mountains that look like they were created by someone incredibly bored of making mountains who left it to an algorithm. Snow and desert are your two basic flavours but greenery does make an appearance. While we appreciate it’s hard to make the terrain interesting for a game that takes place primarily in the air it would’ve been nice to see more love and time spent on the ground given the amount of time you’ll be looking at it.

Aeronautica Imperialis: Flight Command has a decent set of rules governing its turn based air combat and works well in that regard but also feels like developer Binary Planets hasn’t really given the rest of the package enough attention. There’s little to no set dressing, menus are 40K themed but incredibly basic and bland, and explosions and particles look like they came from an asset store. We had a lot of fun with Flight Command when the tactical decisions got tough but the rest of the package just isn’t the same quality as the gameplay at the moment.