Combat Flight Simulator |
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Saturday, November 07 1998
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Combat Flight Simulator |
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Saturday, November 07 1998
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CFS is the sim that almost could |
| Microsoft
enters the on-rushing crowd of WWII flight simulators
with Combat Flight Simulator. After Microsoft's success
in general aviation simulators with their popular Flight
Simulator titles, I was anxious to see what they could do
for Combat Sims. With highly anticipated hits such as
Microprose's European Air War, Janes WWII Fighters and
even free to download, online games like Warbirds to
compete with, Microsoft had to push out a quality sim to
hit the shelves before anyone else. While Microsoft was the first to reserve shelf space to put their product on, it was at the price of cutting a few features that would have made this sim a true winner. Lack of planes to fly is one example of either a rush to get a product out the door, or the marketing tactics to get more money out of paying customers. Making them have to buy an expansion disk to get more planes and features. This should be well known to those of you Janes Simulation fans, as you have most likely been the victim to this marketing technique. Also, another clearly cut corner is the lack of communication with your wingmen. Your wingmen like to make good use of their radios, calling in hostile aircraft positions when spotted and to help co-ordinate attacks. Unfortunately, it seems that your plane is the only plane in the war to be left without a radio capable of transmitting. You have no way of communicating with anyone in anyway, not even the tower. Even with the obvious lack of features and planes, MSCFS is still a fairly strong contender in the fight to win your money. The graphics are very well done, though nothing spectacular. The plane detail is the best I've seen since Warbirds. The flight model is on par with WB also. CFS features 8 planes to fly including 2 BF109's, 2 Spitfire's, A Hurricane Mk1, a P47, P51, and a (believe it or not) Sopwith Camel, which was carried over from Flight Sim 98. The flight models are excellent, with the exception of the German aircraft, they feel just right. As for the German aircraft, they feel a bit too sluggish, as my understanding is that they are comparable in flight characteristics to the P51 and Spit, though they don't have very good visibility. The sound of aircraft whizzing by, the chattering of gunfire, and the radio calls of your fellow wingmen all are very well done and add to the experience of being a WWII fighter pilot. Combat Flight Simulator is a great sim in of itself. Best of all it's probably the most stable running of all sims out there, due to the fact that it's a Microsoft product running under their own OS. CFS has only once crashed on me, and I've been playing it several hours per day for the past week. Overall, Combat Flight Sim is the sim that almost could. It strives to be the best, but lacks too many features now standard in other sims, to be the leader. So if you're looking for a good, stable, fairly simple, and extremely addicting WWII flight sim,
Check Six! |
 Chalk up another kill! I'd recommend looking at CFS before all others.Each plane has its own unique, and accurate flight model. Also, each aircraft is meticulously modeled both inside and out. The cockpit art is some of the best to be seen in a WWII simulator. CFS also features a semi-interactive cockpit. This means that most gauges, switches, knobs and buttons in the cockpit do more than just look perty. Most of them have actual functions if you click on them with the mouse. You can do anything from start the engine to manually pump and lock down the landing gear if the hydraulics fail. This interactively adds to the feel of an already good sim. Combat Flight Sim offers several modes of play. Including FreeFlight, Quick Combat, Single mission, Campaign, Training, and Multiplayer. FreeFlight is an arena to fly around in without having to worry about being shot at. Its best used to get the feel for your aircraft. Quick Combat is exactly that, a quick combat mission similar to a gauntlet. A predetermined number of planes attack wave after wave, your mission is to destroy as many as possible before you are killed. Single missions are basically a quick way of playing a campaign mission without having to actually go into a campaign, good for a quick mission when your in the mood. There are several Single Missions to choose from, which are split up into groups according to the air force you want to fly for. You have the choice to fly in the US Army Air Corps, British Royal Air Force, or the Luftwaffe, which is is the German Air Force. Campaigns are similar to Single Missions. A Campaign is a group of missions you must fly to complete the game and hopefully win the war. Most missions are historically accurate, which adds to the overall feel of being a real pilot in a massive war. Before you go off and enter the war in a campaign, it'd be a good idea to fly through some of the training missions to learn all of the basic aircraft systems and functions. In training, you are guided by the voice of an instructor through a series of training missions. Training is very similar to that used in Longbow 2. Rather than having to read your instructors instructions in flight like the Flight Simulator series, you hear his voice instructing you as you fly. This method is much easier for the trainee and more effective. Perhaps the best and worst of CFS is in its Terrain engine. While it looks fantastic, even while flying low, it's relatively flat. The rolling hills of Europe is represented using textures rather than actually modeling the terrain. Though it does feature large mountains, hills and such. Overall the graphics are excellent, though cant compare to that of EAW or Janes WWII Fighters. The one area that CFS surpasses all other flight sims of its era is in its sound. CFS has some of the best, most realistic sounds to be found in a flight sim. |
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