Combat Flight Simulator 3

Richard takes to the unfriendly skies to evaluate this just out from Microsoft.

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Imagine you are a fighter pilot during the second world war, flying daring missions over enemy territory. You'd engage in dog fights in the clear blue skies with the best that the Luftwaffe could throw at you. Holding the Germans at bay during the largest aerial campaign the world has ever seen. It sounds exciting right? So it's strange that Microsoft's “Combat Flight Simulator 3 – Battle For Europe” seems determined to sap the life out of the experience.

The first thing to note about Combat Flight Simulator is that it's a performance beast. Ignore the four hundred Mhz specification on the back of the box. If you don't have at least a one gigahertz processor and a shiny new graphics card bail out now pilot. There are a number of graphics options that can be fine tuned, from the models to the scenery, but even with most of them on low settings the game would get quite choppy from time to time at 800 x 600 on my system. The graphics themselves are a real mixed bag ranging from great to awful. The plane models and most of the objects are very nicely modelled with lots of detail. The terrain has some nice touches such as lots of trees and buildings dotted about. While they are very simply modelled they do a good job of making the ground seem more lively, and boy does it need it. I'm reminded of a scene in Blackadder Goes Forth when General Melchett unrolls the battle map upside down saying, “God it's a barren featureless wasteland out there!” The terrain is flat, very flat. If you fly around quite low you can see the ground undulate with some small inclines and hills but you have to be very low to notice it and from any reasonable height it just looks boring with not a hill in sight. The balance between the graphics seems a tad ‘off’ to me. Why have such detailed models if the player is rarely going to be close enough to notice them and even when you are close enough you're swooping past at two hundred miles per hour. Instead they could have used simpler models and made the terrain more interesting.

The developers have made some poor design decisions in other areas, too. If you are viewing from within the aircraft the dashboard and the cockpit frame dominate the display. Look at your monitor, now place a book covering the bottom half of it and you get the idea. Now this may be an accurate portrayal of a real cockpit but it doesn't make for a fun game playing experience. Ideally a cockpit view should give you the feeling of being in the plane, and you could augment the sensation by having the windows being cracked by shrapnel or charred by flack. You get none of that and you'll probably play through the game with the cockpit turned off. It's not like the developers haven't taken liberties in other aspects of the interface to aid game play. You'll find a radar in the top left corner of the screen, ammo and fuel statistics overlayed on the right, plus you can toggle up to five different instruments along the bottom such as the altimeter and speed. You can even change some to the metric system if you find that reading dials in miles per hour is too confusing.