Navigation
Introduction / Plot:
It's world-war again, and again we're supposed to be the yankees, and guess what, again we're gonna bomb the yellow jappie... how original, at least you will note use an atomic bomb, you'll have actually to fight with less resources than the jappie. The introduction screens are really basic with standard sound/graphics options, I was not able to set the gamepad as controller. Anyway, with fingers on crosses and on a/z/shift/alt (urgh) I was ready to enjoy this Arcade Flight Simulator...
Gameplay / Controls: 5.4/10
Controlling with keyboard is always a nightmare, even if you are more precise than with any other form of pads. Tough the game has not an high refresh rate (on a decent pc, that's it, not on a p7-10000), so u will easily find yourself getting too close to objects, even crashing into them. The real trouble is that I was expecting some nice arcade action, looking at screenshoots I thought... 'hey it's an after-burner clone, nice', instead, here, we have a game with briefings, predefined path and absolutely no arcade frenzy. Controls are Arcade-way, but gameplay is neither Arcade nor Simulating, so even if supported by a nice looking 3d engine and good sounds, the game will fail to catch your gameplay attention for more than few hours. Especailly on the first, snow level, you'll afford random crashes into the hills, whilst u were thinking to be safe for another couple hundreds of meters.
Well, out of the whole game, sounds were the only thing that did really surprise me. Pumping up the volume, you may actually find yourself into an airplane, especially when doing hard moves, you will ear the air flowing.
Graphics 6.5/10
As you can see, graphics are well done, really well done, aside from the uninspiring white mountains. Tough the trouble lies in the high complexity of the graphic engine, charge your pc with a superb 3d accellerator (a tnt2 will not make it) and with a lot of processing speed, otherwise you'll have to set the details to 0% and still enjoy sloppiness and an huge frame skipping trouble. Seems like a good thought 3d engine but still in beta stage, without any code optimization.
Overall 5.5/10
It's not arcade, it's not a sim, it looks good, it sounds good. Basically this game has no target, since it will disappoint both arcade and flight sim fans, though maybe some people coming from Descent and it's clones may enjoy having a 'real-life' briefing and some out-door graphics, anyway in brief I was higly disappointed by this title :o/
