Warhammer 40,000 is one of those inscrutable things that I recognize and acknowledge, even respect, but have little to no interest in deconstructing. While the fandom and staying power behind a tabletop situation as complex as Warhammer 40K is admirable, it’s also a multifaceted thing that takes hundreds of hours to fully appreciate, and hundreds of dollars to capture all that you enjoy. So, while I’ve dabbled in the occasional game title, such as Vermintide, I’ve never really been driven to read up more on the greater universe or concept. And, having now played Warhammer 40,000: Dakka Squadron – Flyboyz Edition, I can safely say that I doubt I ever will.

Dakka Squadron assumes one of two things out the gate: either you know everything there is to know about Warhammer 40K or you simply do not care, because the game gives zero introduction to anything other than the concept of flying and shooting. Apparently I’m an orc, and I’m an orc that can fly a fighter plane, but it’s more like a World War II fighter plane because I’m certainly not Top Guning anything. Moreover, there are different clans of orcs and you can totally choose between them and have different passive bonuses that probably align a lot with the deep seated mythology of the Bad Moons or the Evil Sunz, but I just chose the one that had the best armor and called it a day.

After a rudimentary introduction to the main ideology of “fly, ram, shoot and don’t hit walls,” you get dropped into several back-to-back missions of shooting things, not shooting things and trying to stay alive. From the very beginning, there was an offness to Dakka Squadron that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I think it started when I saw the floating mouse cursor that I could move over the publisher’s logo that told me “this wasn’t really made for the Switch,” but I still pressed on. After all, not every title meant for the Switch fails when ported: Disco Elysium sped up my myopia about 30% but it still handled fantastically. So I put aside my concerns and dove in.

However, my trepidation about the offness only became more apparent the more I played. Flight simulators are, by their very nature, disorienting, and that’s supposed to be half the challenge. Being able to handle the rapid change in how you view the world and know up from down means taking severe risk and reward every time you make a wild turn or flip. The initial world of Dakka Squadron, though, was so murky and monotone that I had some serious issues in figuring out where certain things were. I had a general idea of where the ground was, but sometimes the exact distance between it and me fluctuated, and I only found out when my plane bounced off it, like a rubber model a child spiked into the ground.

When I say “back-to-back,” I mean just that: you have to do four successive missions before you can really stop, evaluate and figure out what’s going on. These four missions all involve multiple stages, like shifting from shooting turrets to planes, or protecting a convoy to entering a dogfight. You have three lives, and failure means starting at the beginning of the current mission. If, like me, you think you can put down your Switch and come back to this later, be warned: more than once Dakka Squadron ended up hanging and just looping the background music while waiting for the game to load, which never came. I had to restart and, surprise, I was back at the beginning of all the missions.

The firefighting and flight are two different sides of an equally unpleasant meal. The shooting, on the one hand, is aided by the concept of ramming, which is great if the AI ever actually lets you close enough to ram, as it does massive damage and affords very little to you. In actuality, you spend most of your time shooting wildly in the general direction of the reticule and letting bullets land as they will, since you can shoot over an infinite distance and might actually hit. Ideal for stationary targets, but rather nonsense for shooting planes.

Flying in Dakka Squadron isn’t just a pain in the annoyance sense, it also can physically make you ill. I know very little about planes (despite this fake pilots’ license I have), but I know they traditionally like to fly side to side with a general idea of ascent and descent. While I can forgive the AI and, subsequently, the player, from going into nosedives on occasion, the sheer number of times where I was just vertically flying up for way too long was bananas. It became so easy to quickly get lost in the sky that I wasn’t at all surprised when I then crashed into something shortly after getting my bearings. It tends to happen when you looking for something in your room to hold the horizon steady like I’m on my first whale watch and it’s a bad day in Narragansett Bay.

While there are additional planes that can be unlocked with different attributes and attacks, being able to actually achieve them is little more than a pipe dream unless you are all in on Dakka Squadron. The amount of points you get for successfully clearing a mission is negligibly small when you compare it to the five digit price tag on even unlocking the next ship. Additionally, the changes aren’t really enough to justify the time investment unless you are all about the Warhammer: 40,000 universe.

Which brings me to the biggest prong of this whole ordeal: the audio. There’s a bit of music during the menus and some introductory moments, but, for the most part the score is nonexistent. Instead, you get different ambient sounds of gunfire, plane engines..and orcs. The same repetitive, stereotypical orcs over and over and over. Look, I had a blast with Warcaft back in the day, and part of the joy was hearing the orcs call out “Work to do!” or “Joo want axe?” as I moved pieces around the map. But these orcs only have the same four lines they cycle through again and again, ad nauseam, at the top of their lungs. The screech of “DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA” lost all meaning after a mercifully short while, but the sound tears at my eardrums even now.

What bothers me the most is that Dakka Squadron has the bones of a decent game beneath the surface, but it doesn’t belong on the Switch in this state. It chugs, it handles like a monkey-driven tractor and it’s visually unpleasant to behold. The Steam version appears to be at least a bit more favorably viewed, but most of the critiques of it are just Steam users doing their own orc impressions. Great, a game held afloat by memes, surely nothing can go wrong here. Yet without any actual feedback, a game cannot improve, and the “fans” have done nothing but parrot nonsense and giving the devs the false impression this was ready for showtime.

If you can parse down the file size significantly, change the interface so you aren’t using a floating mouse cursor, lower the unlock price tags and polish the performance overall, this could be a fun little title regardless of your familiarity with Warmhammer 40,000. As it stands, Dakka Squadron is boring, repetitive, painful and a waste of time, especially if you aren’t out here just to screech a line from a game while others hoot in acknowledgement.

Graphics: 3.0 Very ugly tonality between land and buildings, planes definitely all blur together at a certain distance and it was often difficult to tell what was friendly and what was foe, so I just shot at everything.	Gameplay: 3.5 Though there was variety into how the same missions came across, they always did: fly around, shoot stationary objects, shoot moving objects, try to make sure some things don’t get shot. I’m not an aerial combat expert, but the unraveling of the gameplay mechanics makes me feel that there’s more to dogfighting than “keep spinning and shooting.”
Sound: 1.5 Nightmarish. Little to no music and just unending squeals and clips of orc-adjacent English, complete with mispronunciations, poor syntax and grating accents. Yes, it may be true to the universe, but that doesn’t make it fun or enjoyable for the audience.	Fun Factor: 2.0 It’s the first game of the year that truly felt like a chore. I had to keep shoveling snow to see what, if anything, would change, and nothing ever did. No massive story setup, no character development, just a lot of shooting and poorly done at that.
Final Verdict: 2.5

Warhammer 40,000: Dakka Squadron – Flyboyz Edition is available now on Steam and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Warhammer 40,000: Dakka Squadron – Flyboyz Edition was provided by the publisher.