![]() ![]() These are a lot harder to pull off than you’d think because it’s easy to stall or your pilot get knocked unconscious from the g-forces. That’s not even counting the complex aeronautical maneuvers like vertical loops and crazy spirals. In a game like Elite Dangerous, I use yaw all the time to fine-tune the ship’s position but here you mostly use it to ensure that the aircraft is coordinated while turning and to counteract external yaw effects from wind and the like. Being high above an enemy makes you almost invulnerable as planes can’t keep their noses pointed up for very long but you can point your nose down. The fastest way of changing your speed isn’t with the throttle but by changing which direction the nose is pointed at. You have to think about gravity and control surfaces. Flying around, taking off and after some practice, even landing, isn’t that hard but you do quickly realize that flying a plane is nothing like flying a spaceship. ![]() Having never flown a realistic sim of any quality, I have to say that the experience is quite eye-opening. You’re just one tiny cog in a huge machine after all. You can expect to fly at least one mission per day and sometimes two and of course no matter how well or how badly you do, you can’t change the course of the war which is scripted. But it can get boring when you get assigned the same missions to the same zones over and over again and getting through the entire campaign is a slog as it’s something like four months. I suppose it is immersive and you can turn up the time acceleration during those long distance missions when you need to escort bombers. For example, you could be assigned to cover the ground troops and if no enemy planes show up, then you just spend some time circling the area and then you go home. There’s actually not much of a difference in the missions here except that they’re generated for you and sometimes absolutely nothing happens in a mission. The career mode has you play as a pilot across several months of a campaign, racking up medals and getting promoted as you successfully accomplish missions and get kills. The game remains plenty challenging to me with the realistic flight physics, AI pilots who can fly more precisely than me and who possess a wider range of aerobatic maneuvers they know, the ridiculously complete damage model, having to deal with light and weather conditions and so on. It’s pretty much impossible for me to recognize which planes are enemies and which are friends by squinting at those little pixels and heaven forbid I attempt to navigate back to my home base without having a convenient waypoint marker on the map. For full immersion, you’re supposed to fly with all user interface aids turned off but I quickly realized that this is step too far into realism for me. You can move to more training using the quick missions generator, which allow you to set up simple scenarios, adding different types and numbers of enemies and so on. It’s a real nightmare to handle on the ground with the tail wheel unlocked. Surprisingly one of the toughest challenges is taxiing on the runway because the Bf-109 is so finicky with its narrow wheelbase. These missions very simple but do a good enough job of providing basic instructions on how to take off, land, move around, bomb a ground target etc. I made the usual and boring pick of the Bf-109 because it’s powerful and its engine management is automated. Thankfully, you can go onto Steam to download player-made tutorial missions after you have chosen a specific plane to fly. Reading the manual is a must, something that I haven’t done for over a decade at least, but to find it I had to go looking into the game’s official forums. There are no tutorials nor even any guide as to how the controls are set up. I also thought that flying World War II-era planes would be simpler, without all of the complicated electronics, and it has a career mode which looks like it could be fun.Īs only to be expected, this being a serious game that is part of a long series with its own enthusiast community, starting this up is a daunting, very newbie-unfriendly experience. This is an old but still reasonably well respected game and it’s available on Steam. Since I now have a joystick, even if it is the super cheap Logitech Extreme 3D Pro, I thought I ought to try a proper flight simulator game at least once. ![]()
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