YMMV / Bomber Crew

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The final Enemy Ace you face in the Secret Weapons DLC not only flies a stealth fighter, but appears to be a vampire.
• Difficulty Spike: The USAAF DLC is notably more difficult than the vanilla game.
  • For starters, your B-17 carries fewer bombs, making aiming far more critical. But you're asked several times to bomb moving naval targets, which require using your navigator's custom heading ability to aim your plane along the ship's path of travel to have any chance to hit.
  • In the RAF campaign, Optional Recon targets give both research points to progress towards unlocking equipment and cash to help purchase them, but in the USAAF campaign only land-based recon targets give money alongside research points. Recon opportunities for ships are much more common, but only give research points. Coupled with the upgrade tree being compressed but the prices being steeper^note In the RAF campaign there are seven levels of radar upgrades. In the USAAF there are only three, and the max-level gives the same effects as the max-level RAF one, but upgrading from level two radar to level three costs fifteen thousand dollars., upgrading your plane will take longer.
  • If you lose your landing gear and crash at your airfield it's an nearly-guaranteed plane destruction, while the Lancaster had noticeably better odds of survival when attempting a single-gear landing or belly landing, and due to having fully-enclosed landing gear bays while the B-17's landing gear still sticks out the bottom of the engine nacelles even when retracted, the Lancaster was less likely to lose landing gear in the first place.
  • The B-17 has significantly less forwards firepower than the Lancaster due to lacking a nose gun. The cheek guns and roof and ball turrets try, but they just don't have the same coverage. This was significant weakness crews of actual B-17's reported as well, which led the Americans to add a chin turret with dual .50 caliber machine guns operated by the bombadier to the B-17G, but as the in-game aircraft seems to be the B-17F model, it doesn't have access to it.
  • Also not helping when fighting heavy fighters and jets is that the B-17 doesn't get 20mm cannons like the Lancaster, and .50 cal guns have neither the per-hit power nor the armor piercing value of 20mm guns, which makes a significant difference against more heavily armored fighters like Me 262s.
  • In the RAF campaign, even if all your gun turrets have ammo feeds you can still send your crew to the ammo box to "manually" reload, which restores the ammunition count in their belt to full. This can be helpful to prevent your gunners having to reload early in an engagement and keep them firing. Unfortunately because you can't tell your gunners to do this in the USAAF campaign, it's possible to go into an engagement with your most powerful turret having less than twenty bullets in the belt, and then get savaged by attacking fighters while your gunner reloads.
  • And if all that wasn't enough, the "safe zone" around your airfield — the point at which attacking aircraft will break off rather than continuing to swarm you — is much smaller than in the RAF campaign, being a sliver of the North African coast rather than the whole of England. It's not uncommon for a flight of enemies to be loitering near there, too, which has the risk of turning a scrape-through-by-your-fingernails mission into a crew and plane loss, within sight of your home airfield.
• Goddamn Bats: Before the first patch, tripping a radar search would mean you'd be swarmed by jet propelled Me-262 interceptors, which were wickedly fast and difficult to hit. In addition you'll occasionally be overwhelmed over a target by multiple patrols of three Me-109s, which while relatively easy to kill, can chew up your plane quickly if you're unprepared.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The inability for the gunners to attack the fighters without prompting by the players tend to be frustrating.
• Spiritual Successor: To the MicroProse game B-17 Flying Fortress, which was the first bomber simulation to feature crew management. In comparison Bomber Crew is Lighter and Softer, not requiring the player to actually fly the plane or fire the guns, just direct the crew to do so.
• Tear Jerker: If you succeed in the final mission, the survivors will be standing apart with their heads hanging down wearily, while General Biggins and others celebrate.
• That One Boss: Bruno Brennen. His plane uses incendiary ammo, which can quickly overwhelm your bomber with a ton of small fires, especially if you don't have enough fire extinguishers. If you don't put these fires out immediately, they can easily decimate your entire crew and even cause your bomber to come apart in mid-air.
• That One Level: Operation Chastise. Like the historical "Dambusters" mission, getting the timing right on dropping your bouncing bomb so it destroys the dam can be hair tearingly difficult. By comparison, doing a high altitude drop of a Tallboy bomb on certain missions is just a bit harder than a regular bombing run.