iF/A-18E Carrier Strike Fighter

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Review: IF/A-18E Carrier Strike Fighter

If it weren't for the hobbling effects of its graphics framework, I'd be praising I-Magic's new iF/A-18E Carrier Strike Fighter as one of the best new flight sims in years. Boasting an exhaustively detailed avionics package, a first-rate flight model, and one of the best dynamic-campaign engines on the market, it does a bang-up job of bringing the US Navy's imposing new 21st-century F/A-18E Super Hornet to the PC.

But in my first six hours with the game, I faced more than a dozen lockups. Numerous cold reboots and several reinstalls later, I've been able to get part way into some engrossing campaign action, but I still keep my fingers nervously crossed on the joystick with every CAT launch.

iF/A-18E offers a variety of play options including a training simulator, instant action, and head-to-head multiplayer competition over serial/modem, network, or TCP/IP Internet connection. The real fun starts once you begin your career as a naval aviator. A pair of fully dynamic campaigns, in the Persian Gulf or the Aegean Sea, tests your ability at earning promotions and medals while performing wartime carrier-flight operations in both day and night conditions.

Despite its notable advances in the field of flight modeling, avionics, and AI, iF/A-18E has more than its fair share of glitches. The ACLS (Automated Carrier Landing System) is buggy and unreliable, your wingmen constantly execute Blue Angel-type barrel rolls while flying in formation, and enemy missiles are much too easy to spoof with flares and chaff. But these are patchable offenses that pale in comparison to the game's more serious graphic problems.

I-Magic's DEMON terrain-mapping engine seems to be developing some brand new vices beyond the ones that were patched in the company's earlier products. Although there are no more of if-22's terrain-loading pauses, the lockups and crashes show little or no sign of clearing up after a year-long massage. The D3D-fueled graphics also produced some very strange anomalies on my machine, such as airstrips floating several hundred feet in the air and 200-foot mountains of water surrounding the carrier. Even when they seem to be behaving properly, the visuals aren't even close to being in the same league as 3Dfx-powered titles like F-15 and Joint Strike Fighter. There are no cool nighttime lighting effects from missile shots, exploding surface targets emit uniformly unspectacular geysers of smoke, and-carrying on an unfortunate legacy from iF-22-I could swear that the sun, horizon, and clouds in the game were drawn in with a blunt crayon.

I can appreciate I-Magic's loyalty to its much-maligned terrain engine, but if it ever has the courage to swap it for a more stable, generic system like the one used in Jane's F-15, add a 3Dfx patch, and fix a few small bugs, iF/A-18E could be the best naval aviation sim on the market.-- Andy Mahood / GamePro