Flying Tigers: Shadows Over China is an air combat action game set during the Second World War. You play one of the Flying Tigers, American pilots who flew for China during its war with Japan. You can take to the skies in multiplayer combat, complete aerobatic challenges or just fly around the landscape enjoying yourself, but the meat of this game is in the single-player missions, in which you'll take on the enemy over various Asian locales.

Alone against the empire

Flying Tigers: Shadows Over China is definitely an arcade action game rather than a flight simulator; there isn't much in the way of technical detail. Instead, it features fast-paced aerial combat gameplay in which you roll and dive to escape enemy fire while blasting away at your targets. The weapon targeting isn't incredibly accurate, which is a feature rather than a bug -- aiming in the sky is a challenge. To make things easier, you can initiate a slow-motion mechanic called Trazertime, which lets you go into a kind of bullet-time mode that allows for more precise aiming. If you ever played the air combat arcade game Attack on Pearl Harbor, you'll recognise many features of its light, fast-paced action gameplay.

Get in the cockpit

Flying Tigers: Shadows Over China isn't the most polished-looking game, but it's a lot of fast-paced fun, especially if you like the idea of historical air combat but don't want a real simulator.