Warhammer 40,000: Dakka Squadron - Flyboyz Edition

My first thought firing up Dakka Squadron was that arcade air combat games have no business being this scarce in 2021, so even a rough one gets a fair look. What I found is a game that started life on mobile, got pushed to PC, and carries every bit of that lineage with it - for better and occasionally for worse. The core flight loop is tighter than the price and heritage suggest. Barrel rolls, snap turns, and boost-fueled 180s give you enough movement tech to actually play aggressively rather than just circle-strafing everything to death. The heat system is the mechanical highlight: firing your Supa-Shootas generates heat, and you have to boost to bleed it off - but boosting drains your evasion resource, so there is a genuine risk-reward cycle happening under the hood. Armor regenerates passively when you pull off active damage, which means the combat rhythm has a real pulse to it. Plane selection spans Dakkajets, Burna-Bommas, and Blitza-Bommas, each with different speed, endurance, and firepower stats, and your choice matters because mission types - air-to-air dogfights, carpet bombing runs, ground target destruction, escort defense - genuinely favour different loadouts. Weapons unlock via the in-game currency called teef, earned through mission completion, though the unlock grind skews steep relative to how quickly mission rewards trickle in. The campaign runs across five planets and clocks around 20 missions, framed by an Ork clan rivalry over who gets to lead the next Waaagh. It is a thin premise, but the voice acting doing the heavy lifting is legitimately good - your Airboss and fellow Flyboyz have real comedic timing, and the script captures the anarchic, barely-functional belligerence that makes 40K Orks worth spending time with. The five selectable clans - Blood Axes, Goffs, Bad Moons, Death Skullz, Evil Sunz - come with different passive bonuses, though in practice the stat spreads feel narrow enough that clan choice is more flavour than strategy. Mission variety is the campaign's soft underbelly: attack, defend, and escort cover almost everything, level layouts repeat across planets, and the enemy AI gets lost in confined spaces with visible embarrassment. Multiplayer is where things get practically hypothetical. The mode is Airbrawl - straight deathmatch across ten maps, supporting up to 60 players simultaneously, which would genuinely be chaotic fun. The problem is that the PC playerbase is thin enough that you will be filling lobbies with bots unless you are organising a group session yourself. There is no ranked structure, no progression tied to PvP performance, and no reason to return beyond the novelty of the chaos. For a shooter that lists online PvP as a selling point, that is a meaningful gap. The PC version avoids the frame pacing disasters that plagued console ports, and it runs cleanly on modest hardware, which counts for something. Controls work well on both mouse-and-keyboard and gamepad, and the snap maneuvers stay responsive even in crowded engagements. Bottom line: this is a niche item. If you want 40K atmosphere delivered through an accessible arcade flight system and you are fine with the campaign being the whole product, there is a functional and occasionally charming game here. If you came for PvP or depth past the heat-management system, you are going to run out of reasons to stay faster than an Ork jet runs out of structural integrity.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

Be the first to comment on Warhammer 40,000: Dakka Squadron - Flyboyz Edition.