War Wings

» see miniclip.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The Miniclip name belongs to the browser era. Through the 2000s it ran a site that put free games on a page for anyone who wandered in, and that was the business. War Wings, in 2017, was a 3D multiplayer game for phones with a Chinese owner standing behind it.

Tencent had taken its stake in Miniclip in February 2015, and War Wings was the first Tencent game Miniclip put out in the West afterward. Tencent had already developed and released it across Asia. Miniclip rebuilt it for the Western stores with a studio called Mobilefish.

It was a Second World War dogfighting game, four players against four, free on iOS and Android. The United Kingdom got it on 27 July 2017 ahead of everyone else, and the worldwide release followed on 17 August.

The soft launch across Europe and Australia had already passed a million downloads. In its first week in the United Kingdom it sat in the top three on both stores, and it carried a four-and-a-half star average off more than thirty thousand ratings. There was an award for best mobile game from the CDGA and two more from the MDCC.

It was on the Turkish stores the same as everywhere else, free and in English, for two years and four months. It never crossed my screen. Then on 1 January 2020 it stopped.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the books it was built from ~

Miniclip's own page for the game opens with a reading list, which support pages do not generally do. It names Pierre Clostermann's The Big Show and Geoffrey Wellum's First Light, then Boyington's Baa Baa Black Sheep, Saburo Sakai's Samurai!, Cajus Bekker on the Luftwaffe and Xu Hua Jiang's Footprints of Flying Horses. Six titles in all, covering pilots who had flown on opposite sides of the same war.

The rest of the page keeps that register. It talks about the damp heat of a tent on a central Pacific island and a cold morning at an airfield on the Ardennes front. The mechanical notes are just as particular: a pursuit assist called Jäger and a god-view mode for situational awareness. Damage was calculated by where you were hit rather than drawn off a health bar, so a burst into the engine took a plane down on the spot.

~ a help page that still answers ~

The page carries one sentence of cause, more than most dead games are given: the game was discontinued on the 1st of January 2020 due to commercial and technical reasons. Then it asks you to leave a comment about what you liked best. The article was created on 7 December 2017 while the game was alive and last edited on 7 October 2026, which is this month. The App Store id returns nothing in any country now and the old address serves a different Miniclip title, but somebody there is still maintaining the obituary of a six-year-old casualty and still inviting you to say something kind about it.

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