If you were to ask a gaming executive what they would do with a license to the characters from the Peanuts comics, chances are they’d give you corporate-sounding nonsense that translated to "poorly designed, bug-ridden ’casual mini-game’ compilation meant to cash in on the Wii Sports craze." Thankfully, Snoopy Flying Ace is not at all like that; it is instead a World War 1 themed aerial combat game with the Peanuts cast, inspired by Snoopy’s fantasies of flying against the Red Baron. The result is a dogfighting game that you can learn how to play in just a few minutes, and a mix of decent single-player missions and good online play serve to make it surprisingly fun.

While online play is the primary mode, players should definitely try the single-player campaign first; it has a few basic but useful tutorials that will get you flying competently in short order, and help you come to terms with the core concepts of Snoopy Flying Ace. This isn’t really a flight sim; while some flying principles do apply you’ll find the controls are very easy to learn. Instead, the real depth in this game lies in combining several basic ideas well. Each of these WW1-style planes fits into the category of being fast but fragile, slow but durable, or a balance of the two for average performance. These are joined by a stunt system that allows you to easily do barrel rolls, split-s turns, and loops to shake off attackers (though if you do them at the wrong time, they’ll just pounce on you for it), resulting in a fair amount of variety in how dogfights play out.

The other major feature in these dogfights are your weapons. Each plane has a basic machine gun, but can also equip your choice of two different special weapons. They’re quite varied, ranging from long-range cannons that require excellent aim to short-range ’shotguns’, mid-air minefields and homing missiles, and more; each has their own value in certain situations and game modes. This is true enough in the offline levels where you take on a variety of missions, but it’s even more apparent when you play against other people over Xbox Live.

There are a good number of online game modes, with the obvious things like mission co-op play and free-for-all dogfights being just the start. There are also several other modes, including capture the flag, and a sports mode that they call "Pigskin" and seems sort of like what would happen if you mixed rugby, American-rules football, and airplanes. The dogfighting action usually runs smoothly even with a large number of players, and only in the case of very bad connections will you see any significant ’lag stutter’ to the play. This is good, because online play is definitely the heart of Snoopy Flying Ace.

Despite the theme of World War 1 dogfighting, this game isn’t particularly ’violent.’ Sure, planes catch fire, smoke and sputter and explode, but every pilot always ejects safely with their parachutes; this is a game based on Peanuts after all. Combined with the fairly easy to learn controls and the game’s depth coming from learning multiple basic concepts rather than a few complex ones, the result is a pretty family friendly game. And if competitive play by split-screen or online isn’t to your interest, co-op through the ’single-player’ missions works just fine too.

Snoopy Flying Ace definitely earns its $10/800 MSP price. A passable single-player campaign is joined by excellent online play, intuitive flying controls, decent graphics, and nice music and sound to add up to a surprisingly good game. Reasonably deep without being overwhelmingly ’hardcore’, this is a great addition to anyone’s XBLA library.