Simulating a complete fleet is hard. Unless you make the player a fleet commander, but then, your game turns into a tactical one. If you're trying to stay within the simulation genre, you better…
…have an excellent AI controlling the ships accompanying the player.
…have a plan how to give the player still an interesting role in the missions.
Advanced Destroyer Simulator avoids this issue altogether and it creates an almost paradoxical historical situation in the process. The player takes control over a British destroyer in the 2nd World War. A lone destroyer, regularly facing off against enemy forces in superior numbers. What may be somehow imaginable in the Mediterranean (where the British faced the powerful Italian fleet) becomes almost absurd in the English Channel or the North Sea (where the British had the clear superiority at least above the surface).With the advent of new technologies comes a time of innovation, a time when pioneers set out to explore the potential of the latest inventions. Red Baron is remarkable in this concern because it is not only about the early days of a new kind of warfare, but because it was in itself one of the first dedicated combat flight simulators for home computers set in this era. And so it helped to lay down the basics of the genre just like the historical biplanes in it did for the aerial combat. A very fitting combination so to speak which gives the game a timeless appeal: Entering this world of rough 3D graphics and simplistic flight models seems to have a lot in common with taking off in one of those fragile flying machines of WWI. But let us take a look at how exactly this works to the game’s (dis)advantage and what else makes it a classic.