F-22 Lightning 3

Reviews / previews

Review: F-22 Lightning 3

The terrain engine doesn't look particularly impressive, the explosions all look the same after you've seen two or three, and weather and lighting effects are inconsequential. The various cockpit displays are still almost entirely useless, since there's no use for anything other than the main HUD view with the attack display open in the corner of the screen.

The F-22's role as a stealth aircraft is largely ignored, since you'll have to dogfight any nearby aircraft. For ground attacks, you have to drop bombs from directly over your target rather than firing air-to-ground missiles from a safe distance. Nothing here suggests the U.S. military's latest and greatest hardware. Whereas the F-16/MiG-29 bundle showed affection for the aircraft being modeled, NovaLogic's F-22 may as well bear the designation "Generic Hi-tech Airplane".

The real appeal of this game is its multiplayer gaming. Lightning 3 marks the debut of Novalogic's Voice Over Net technology, which lets you talk to one pilot at a time using real-time voice communications. The company's servers do a smooth job of supporting skies crammed with human players sniping at each other. It's a deathmatch played in an open field where the action is fast and simple. No skill required. This is what Novalogic's flight sims are all about. If you want to install a game, click the mouse a couple of times and start slinging Sidewinders like there's no tomorrow, Lighting 3 is the sim for you.

While this sort of Quake-in-the-sky concept sounds good in theory, in practice it just doesn't work very well. Part of what makes deathmatches interesting is the level design and weapon variety--both ingredients conspicuously absent here. In multiplayer games, you'll want to use terrain masking,, in which you fly behind hills to hide from radar, but a clump of fat hills hardly qualifies as level design. As for weapon variety, you have two flavors: long- and short-range missiles, both of which have bloodhound-relentless homing systems. It doesn't help matters that the cockpit interface doesn't offer a way to track inbound missiles, which are only shown as little dots on a flat, 2D attack display.

The single-player game is as underdone and uninteresting as NovaLogic's other sims. The campaigns are a linear series of heavily scripted missions, but you can play the campaigns in any order and you can skip a mission after you've failed it. The biggest challenge in each scenario is using your limited weapons to kill the overwhelming number of enemy aircraft. NovaLogic has made a token attempt to make the world seem livelier by adding handfuls of friendly aircraft going about their business, but it's all canned, with no interaction with the world beyond your lone wingman. This is the standard-variety you-against-the-world gameplay.

Lighting 3 may provide some quick thrills for an hour or so. But, unfortunately, the game as a whole is superficial, nondescript, and drab. I'm sure there's a place for this sort of dull simplification, but it's not on my hard drive.-- Tom Chick / GamePro