That would be fine if said enemies had any sort of AI worth mentioning, but they don’t.

Ultimately, every mission is about shooting down a set number of enemies. It doesn’t lend itself to any more extended play than that, though when you play for a longer period of time, the limited mission variety and dull landscapes have a diminishing effect on any fun to be had. That’s true of Switch, too, if you’re playing on short bus rides or as a brief distraction from other things. In a mobile game, that sort of burst play works. That’s pretty much the extent of the game: jump into a mission, shoot down some enemies, use the spoils to upgrade your squad, then do it all gain. Successful completion of missions rewards with a few different currencies-gold, silver, fuel, and prestige-which you can then use to buy and upgrade planes, recruit and level up pilots, improve your base, and learn new “Commander skills” that provide passive benefits like increasing the spoils from each mission. Three separate “campaigns” let you do all this from the perspective of either Great Britain, the USSR, or Germany, though there isn’t much of a story beyond “you’re the commander of a secret squadron” to propel you into an endless series of generic missions. You can (hopefully) guess from the title what Warplanes: WW2 Dogfight is all about: you take to the skies with any of a handful of different World War II planes to fight other planes, drop bombs, and protect allied bases. It takes a straightforward brief and delivers on that, but without any sort of bells and whistles. Warplanes: WW2 Dogfight isn’t the worst such offender, but it’s still a game that does little to inspire anything more than short bursts of idle, mindless play. But too often, this isn’t the case you’ll get a game that wasn’t all that inspiring to begin with lifted directly from its free-to-play origins to the Switch.

This can be a great thing, when the game was decent to begin with and proper care is taken to rebalance those free-to-play elements for the new “premium” price. One of the side effects of the current mad rush to bring just about every game ever made to Nintendo Switch is the large number of “premium” versions of free-to-play mobile games.

Warplanes ww2 dogfight switch review