After what felt like an eternity, Project Wingman's lead developer "Arby" has finally released the promised 2.0 update for the game. This comes with a series of improvements, but at the same time it also comes with a bit of a surprise. The previously PlayStation exclusive DLC, Frontline 59, has now been released on PC for $4.99. How good is it? Does it have any issues? Let's find out together, shall we?
SPOILERS AHEAD
THE PLOT
Being a DLC of a game that has a complete story, Frontline 59 places itself in a very interesting part of the game's timeline. It is not a prequel or a sequel, but rather it takes place in the middle of Project Wingman's plot and from the enemy's perspective.
Its story starts in the aftermath of Mission 11 "Cold War", the big aerial duel between the Federation and Cascadian forces. During these battle, the Federation sustained irrecoverable losses, mostly due to the actions of Monarch, the game's main protagonist. While that is the end of this battle during the main campaign, you get to see it from the Federation side during the DLC's first mission.
You get to play as Driver, designated squad leader of Unit K-9, a Federation reserve unit that was activated and rushed into service to cover the retreat of the aircraft that managed to escape the onslaught of Mission 11. As you take off, you engage mercenary pilots that are ruthlessly downing Federation cargo aircraft. The more you shoot down, the more that show up to the battle. At the very end, you get to cover the retreat of the infamous Crimson Squadron, battered and winchester (without weapons).
While this mission is quite uneventful, and maybe a bit too reminiscent of Mission 11, it makes sense from a narrative standpoint. It is a direct continuation to that mission and serves as a good launch point for a standalone story, while still connecting it to the main plot.
Mission 2 has K-9 squadron covering the skies over Magadan, as Cascadian forces have now launched an amphibious attack under the orders of General Faust, a new face and the main antagonist of Frontline 59. This mission mainly focuses on ground attack and anti-ship operations. The Cascadians even brought the Eminent Domain, their flagship, to aid in the landing operations.
While you are unable to damage the Eminent Domain, you can damage its accompanying fleet. It is mostly composed of cruisers and LCS vessels, so they are easy to destroy without much trouble.
Mission 3 has you fighting over Tseliadan, a city where a frontline has formed between the invading Cascadians and the reserve infantry and armored units from the Federation. With both sides at a stalemate, you are tasked with clearing the area from anti-air emplacements to enable a squadron of bombers to destroy and break the enemy's offensive line.
This mission is very simple and the most "standard" of them all, no new gimmicks or anything along those lines. Just plain and simple ground pounding and air engagements. You will need to engage with care thanks to the enemy railguns and flak cannons, but those are easy to handle if you fly fast enough.
Mission 4 leads you to what is easily the most memorable mission in the DLC: a tunnel run. You are tasked with doing a deep strike into enemy territory that aims to destroy any semblance of order within Cascadian forces by annihilating their command center directly.
To do this undetected, you will have to fly through kilometers of tunnel, avoiding enemy AAA emplacements to finally emerge and catch the enemy offguard.
The music choice for this mission is on point, and the visual flair of the caverns contrasting with the man-made structures inside it is very appealing. I quite love the light show you get once you come out the other end. Lasers and flak everywhere, all at the dead of night.
Mission 5 has you on a full counter-attack against the now retreating Cascadian forces, which you have displaced to the same coast as Mission 2. With the Eminent Domain present and helping with evacuations, this is when General Faust comes into the fray. She refuses to evacuate and asks her forces to stay with her and push deeper into Federation territory. She abandons her post and goes AWOL along with her loyalists.
Seeing this, and going against her wishes, the commander of the Eminent Domain asks for a temporary truce to allow the retreating Cascadian forces to properly evacuate to avoid further bloodshed. Federation High Command, Crystal Kingdom, denies the request and orders their forces to continue pushing against the weakened Cascadians.
Mission 6 presents an interesting scenario, thanks in due to the nature of your enemy: Faust's White Fleet. She has taken command of what used to be a diplomatic fleet and transformed it into a strike force and has it headed straight towards your base. You are sent to intercept them before they reach their target.
You battle her and her airships as you dodge lasers, railguns and cordium-infused munitions that light up the sky above the post-apocalyptic earth in the Arctic Circle. As you down each of her ships, including a group of elite mercenaries, you hear her become desperate. She starts talking to you about her experience, how she fought in previous wars with the Federation and that her country is no more.
Once you have dealt the final blow to her Battleship, the Roosevelt, she confeses that Cascadia has now discovered technologies that might be far more powerful than even regular Cordium-infused warheads. That, if push comes to shove, the earth will be cracked open with this tech.
With this, her airship explodes high above the earth and the campaign comes to an end. This campaign, while short, feels self-contained and surprisingly cohesive, which is something I was pleasantly surprised with. Since there are no cutscenes, all of this exposition has to be delivered through briefings and in-game dialogue, so you might have to pay special attention to it if you want to avoid replaying just to get the story details you missed while you were locked in. Overall, it was a pleasant experience!
THE UGLY
If you go to the Project Wingman discord or some other communities, it is very easy to tell that the launch of version 2.0 was not smooth. Lots of crashes and fatal errors still plague the game for certain users, and remember, this is after what was supposed to be a long overdue big-fix and improvement update to the base game. Issues also plague the DLC, from broken triggers in certain missions to the infamous bug that stops you from finishing Mission 2 if you kill targets too quickly. This bug, according to some users, was already present in the PS5 version that has been out for over a year now. The fact that that bug is still present in the current version of the PC build is astonishing. It is clear that, while they have had some QA, that these testers missed key points and did not push the edge cases that are usually reached when a build goes public.
For any future releases, I hope that they focus on these key aspects of testing, since for some this has been a very lukewarm and mixed experience. Personally, I had issues with the game constantly crashing due to a very slight overclock I had on my GPU, but these issues were solved the instant I removed said overclock.
This DLC was a very enjoyable experience for me, but I know it wasn't for others. Would I recommend it? If you own Project Wingman already, yes. It is cheap for the amount of content it offers, and it was a genuinely great experience to get to revisit this world after so long.
About the writer
Longtime aviation fanatic with particular preference towards military aviation and its history. Said interests date back to the early 2000s, leading into his livelong dive into civil and combat flight simulators. He has been involved in a few communities, but only started being active around the mid 2010s. Joined as a Spanish to English translator in 2017, he has been active as the co-founder and writer ever since. Twitter | Discord: Cubeboy
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