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Video Game / Airfix Dogfighter

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Airfix Dogfighter is a PC flight-combat game released in 2000, based on the popular Airfix brand of plastic scale models. The game is set in a Toy Story-like setup, where two factions of miniature World War II vehicles are at war with each other while living inside a large human house. You are in control of a miniature plane and are given various objectives during the missions, consisting of either shooting down enemy units, protecting your own units, or retrieving certain collectibles.


This video game provides examples of:

  • Artificial Stupidity: Enemy planes very commonly crash into walls. Then again, you'll find yourself doing that every now and then as well.
  • Bag of Spilling: You start every mission with your upgrades at zero, no matter how much you upgraded your plane during the previous mission.
  • Bilingual Bonus: Some of the rooms in the house, which the armies treat as strategic territories, are referred to by interesting German names, such as "Riesen Sektor" for the parents' bedroom ("Riesen" means "giants").
  • Colour-Coded for Your Convenience / Color-Coded Armies: Friendly planes leave a green trail behind their wings, while enemy planes leave a red one.
  • Cool Plane: The game gives you a considerable selection of miniature planes to choose from.
  • Cosmetic Award: For each completed mission you receive a medal, which you can later see when viewing your pilot in the main menu.
  • Critical Existence Failure: When your health is low, your plane starts being seemingly on fire, but this doesn't hinder your flight or combat abilities in any way. When your health drops to zero, however, you'll immediately plummet down and crash.
  • Death from Above: The secondary weapons meant for destroying earth-bound vehicles and buildings. Also, the planes in general.
  • Escort Mission: A number of them appears for both sides of the conflict.
  • Final Battle: Both of the campaigns have one as the last mission.
  • Hit-and-Run Tactics: Encouraged during some of the missions when the territory is deemed "highly fortified".
  • Level Editor: You are given the ability to edit the existing rooms by putting various objects and items in there.
  • Living Toys: Everyone is a bunch of seemingly alive scale models that wage war inside a human house.
  • No Swastikas: The Axis (a.k.a. the Germans) are represented by a black cross.
  • Old-School Dogfight / Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: Subverted; you still have to have your target more or less in the center of your view in order to shoot at them, but the game will automatically aim the crosshair at the target as soon as they're within range.
  • One-Hit Kill:
    • Normally, bumping into objects and walls only drops a tiny sliver of your health and makes you lose speed, but sometimes, you can crash into something in such a way that your plane just explodes instantly. In particular, crashing into doors while they're in the middle of opening is a guaranteed death. Can double as a Game-Breaking Bug, since you can never be sure what is the point where the game deems the crash as fatal.
    • Early missions have enemy areas that you aren't supposed to fly to yet, and the game will warn you that if you remain there, you will be blown to bits. Stay there any few seconds longer, and it's instant death.
  • Rewarding Vandalism: Big time. You are free to smash every single breakable thing in the house to bits, and there are always some collectibles hidden in them.
  • Scoring Points: This is how the game measures how well you completed a mission. It's affected by the amount of destroyed enemy vehicles, the amount of collected glue and plot-relevant objects, and how much fuel and health you had at the moment of returning to base.
  • Serious Business: Both sides of the conflict treat this as if it was an actual real-life war, with them referring to individual rooms as strategic territories with serious-sounding names.
  • Shows Damage: The more damage your (or enemy's) plane takes, the more visibly damaged it becomes. At first it's smoking a little, followed by being on fire when close to death.
  • Simulation Game: Well, it is a flight simulator.
  • Timed Mission: A number of missions requires you to protect some friendly units before they are destroyed, or, in one case, retrieve a set of plans before they are burned.


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