For more on Birds Of Steel, check out our full Birds Of Steel review. Or, for more of the best Xbox 360 games for a 10 year old, why not try our Family Game Finder
Set in the Pacific in World War 2, Birds of Steel is a combat flight simulator with a bent towards authenticity. Putting you in the cockpit of one of a number of accurately recreated planes, you'll take to the skies across a variety of missions, asking you to sink aircraft carriers, defend bases from attack, and sometimes even simply land a plane.
While it has a bent towards realism, Birds of Steel also comes with an adjustable difficulty, which lets you at least attempt to tailor the game to your skills. While on the hardest difficulty, you'll be struggling to fly a plane that's as tricky to keep in the air as it would be the real thing, on easy, it's next to impossible for you to do anything wrong - although that doesn't make it easy. On both difficulty levels, a single bullet is enough to take you out of the sky, making this rather frustrating.
Due to the design of the game, which lets you take over as one of your wingmen when you get shot down, you have a maximum of four lives to complete each mission - presuming your wingmen haven't already been shot down themselves. It's this unforgiving difficulty, and emphasis on realistic flying that makes this recommended for older children only.
It's worth keeping in mind that in order to unlock any planes beyond the initial limited starting set, you'll need to earn a certain number of in-game lion points, which can only be earnt by either playing online, or taking part in the Dynamic Campaign, a series of incredibly hard missions that have been designed for online co-operative play, and are very, very hard if you try and take them on on your own. If you don't have your console connected to the internet - or, on the Xbox 360, don't have an Xbox Live Gold subscription, it's worth bearing this in mind.
As a flight sim, there's little in the way of true violence in Birds of Steel. There's certainly no blood, guts, and gore, and it's not possible to shoot people you see running around. The only violence there really is is the fact that the game revolves around you shooting other planes down, sinking ships, and blowing up tanks.
While Birds of Steel has a large multiplayer component, it's sadly an online only affair, and so would require two consoles, two copies of the game, and, on the Xbox 360, two Xbox Live Gold subscriptions. That said, if you are lucky enough to have such a setup, you'll likely get a lot more out of this game, as it has a strong online bent, with plenty of co-op missions for you to take part in - it's just a shame it's restricted to online.
Age Ratings
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
