For one, you can't hit enemy fighters until they're nearly at point blank range. You see their silhouettes enlarge as the winged machines approach, but it's rare that you'll take one down before they've spit a good number of bullets upon you, meaning the kills are mostly for posterity and don't do much to actually protect your vessel. Poor collision detection is one thing, but as more and more preset waves swarm in later missions it becomes less likely that you'll arrive home alive, even if you lead each enemy with accuracy.

Then again, maybe it's the lack of perspective that makes it hard to track foes. Regardless of what gun position you're posted at, you'll see the exact same cloud background framed by a different view port. Not only does this mean that it doesn't appear that you're actually flying (the clouds don't move), but using the rotating turrets atop and below of the plane (like the ball gunner) is weirdly disorienting because you don't have a visual point-of-reference to indicate where you're looking.

Manning turrets to take out bogeys -- ideally a fun task, but B-17's gameplay here is hampered by questionable collision detection and a lack of variety.

If the machine gunning's on the better (i.e. less terrible) end of the experience, you might imagine that bombing and "piloting" aren't going to fare well. Each are decidedly shallow: dodging flak fire is a one-sided (and two-button) affair designed simply to eat away at your bomber's life bar by pitching your plane left and right with the d-pad. This sequence might've been made entertaining by attractive sprites, animations, power-ups, or even good design, but no such luck. Bombing does a hare better because of the mild challenge involved. Like the AAA dodging section, you'll shift your plane's view (a crosshair of the ground below) with the d-pad, but also hold up or down to adjust altitude. Each mission assigns a primary target and a handful of secondaries, but you're blasting nearly identical (and ugly) maps of the train yards, U-boat pens, bridges and war factories, replacing any mild meaning or fun with repetition.

If you’re able to make it back to Britain, a percentage sheet reports how well you lit up your objectives and presents a tally of the Nazi planes you took down. To its credit, Skyworks does lay down a decent-looking menu here, and the take off animation looks pretty decent as well. Even the text-based briefing sections that precede each mission are at least passable, but we wish these near-par presentation elements extended to the main game, which bears no music, sound effects that occasionally cut out, and sprites that seem confined to an earth tone color palette.