Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain is the second title in the series of Lucasfilm flight sims set during World War II.
The game is the sequel to Battlehawks 1942, and it's set during the Battle of Britain between the German Luftwaffe and the British Royal Air Force in the summer of 1940.
You can play on both sides of the battle. As a British pilot, you will mostly have defense missions, while germans have attack objectives. The available planes include Spitfire and Hurricane on the British side, Bf 110, Bf 109, and several other bombers on the german side.
Their Finest Hour is not precisely a flight simulator; it's better to consider it an action game, but this is not a negative point. The gameplay is simply perfect. Besides, the option to adopt 3D only partially (only for the backgrounds and limited to plain colors) allowed a fast framerate not only on the PC but also Amiga and Atari ST.
In short, this is a masterpiece that every retro gamer should not miss.
Well ! Their Finest Hour...I read your review which defines it as a masterpiece...Take it easy, let's try to define the matter better. The game undoubtedly looks good, it offers you to relive the stages of the famous Battle of Britain. In truth, there had been a predecessor, it seems to me on the Commodore C64, if I remember correctly it was called..."B.o.B." (Battle of Britain) and although it was designed on a computer of lower performance than the Amiga, it was much more playable. The major flaw of Their Finest Hour was represented by the absolute lack of collaboration with the "virtual" pilots who were part of my squadron, which was supposed to intercept and engage the German bombers. In fact my ..."supposed" computer-controlled fellow pilots were absolutely ...useless. Their ultimate goal was to be shot down by enemy fighters. Practically, the enemy bombers, I would have had to face them alone! Ridiculous...From a strategic point of view, Their Finest Hour, was rather simplistic, if not to say almost none. From a simulation point of view, also considering the technology of the time (early 90s), it was nothing exceptional. It should be added that the anti-piracy protection was also complicated, it was necessary to use a kind of double cardboard wheel to try to match one code perfectly with another and thus obtain the coveted code to be entered via the keyboard... When you say ..."the simplicity...bah" !!! Too bad, because the basic idea wasn't bad, it needed to be treated better. The impression was of being faced with a half-developed game, perhaps due to the rush to get out on the market before some similar competitor's game did it... misplaced fear, given that nothing new will come out (at the time) similar to Their Finest Hour...At least that's my opinion.
Review by: GN Team
Review by: Maurizio Petta
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