Combat Flight Simulator

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Review: Combat Flight Simulator

In Combat Flight Simulator (CFS), Microsoft has taken its award-winning Flight Simulator '98 system and retrofitted the game engine to handle the intricate nature of W.W.II air combat. Each of the eight aircraft in the game has been faithfully depicted, with great flight and damage models, exquisitely detailed 3D exteriors, and active, photo-realistic instrumentation panels.

The terrain-mapping system is handled equally well, again employing photo-realistic graphics to portray the rolling countryside of Europe. While 30 cities are depicted in 3D, three major cities-London, Paris, and Berlin-have been vividly modeled, containing such important landmarks as the Eiffel Tower, the Brandenberg Gate, and Big Ben.

One of the most exciting aspects of CFS is its expandability. CFS lets players import aircraft, missions, and scenery add-on packs from other Flight Simulator '98 products, so that you can take, say, a fully laden 747 jumbo jet up against scores of vintage W.W.II aircraft. And you can also create new missions or even whole campaigns.

CFS includes two campaign games (the Battle of Britain and the subsequent Battle over Europe) and several dozen single missions, a Free Flight "instant action" arena, a Quick Combat mode, and a number of fully interactive training modules. In addition to supporting force feedback, CFS contains loads of multiplay options, including up to eight-player support over a LAN and free access to the MS Gaming Zone.

When the realism settings are cranked to the max and you're head-to-head against several human opponents, it's a blast. Unfortunately, the AI doesn't seem to keep pace, even at the highest competency setting. Time and again, enemy aircraft preferred to go after my wingmen first instead of me, and those that did latch onto my tail were easily shaken with fairly simple tactics. I expected CFS to offer more of a challenge, especially when it comes to dogfighting.

There are other shortcomings that keep this from being the consummate flight sim. For example, while you can listen in on the radio chatter of friendly aircraft during heated engagements, there doesn't seem to be a way for you to issue orders to wingmen. What's more, enabling all the special effects, especially when there are dozens of aircraft flitting about, plays havoc with the game's frame rate. So unless you're prepared to run CFS on a high-end system with a second-generation 3D card, you'll have to reduce some of the visual effects to a bare-bones setting to get the game to run at an acceptable speed.

Finally, although both campaign games employ a branching path-whereby subsequent missions are determined by your overall success rate-each campaign is actually made up of scripted, rather than dynamically constructed, missions.

So despite extendibility and truly impressive flight models, CFS suffers in too many areas to convincingly win the air war in the embattled skies over Europe.-- Marc Dultz / GamePro