MICROSOFT COMBAT FLIGHT SIMULATOR 3


You've got bogeys on your six

By MARTIN KINGSLEY

The messenger was doubled up, hands on knees, in front of my intimidating and humongous black obsidian desk.

I span lazily in my high backed Bond-villianesque leather chair, waiting for him to catch his breath. When I heard what he had to say, I rose and vaulted the desk in a red-hot blaze of fury...

"What? Combat Flight Simulator 3 has been delayed again?! Impudent fool!" As he cowered in the face of my superhuman wrath, I struck him down with a swipe from my trusty 3-wood golf club.

I looked down with some measure of satisfaction at the havoc I had wreaked, and noticed a piece of paper attached via a safety pin to the still warm corpse. It read, "We've given you a review beta to play with instead."

"Oh well, I'll just have to take what I can get." With that sentiment, I kicked the cooling body out into the hall, where it lay bleeding onto the newly-installed carpet and shut the door, before opening it once more, gingerly retrieving the beta CD and then slamming the door shut.

After a moment of silent contemplation, I realised I was still standing in the hall. I opened the door, stepped inside the office, and closed the door for the third and final time. I sighed, and then shoved the CD into the drive…

Dear me, has it really been that long since CFS1 way back in '98? Back then, it was the most beautiful thing in existence, and nothing has changed since those days. I've always loved the look of the planes here: Seeing those rivets and joinings, all with convincing weather effects and real workable control surfaces still puts the CFS series right at the top of the list for graphic details.

The cockpits are all a bit flat, but are rendered in 3D with workable instruments and switches. Damage modeling is likewise detailed, with various parts deformable in various ways -- imagine looking out and seeing the top of your rudder shot off. Weapon effects and explosions are rendered well and the tracer effect is much improved over last year, plus the smoke and explosions are quite convincing.

The sound effects that accompany battle are also suitably thrilling. There's a real metallic weight to the fire, which adds a lot to the experience of dog-fighting. Likewise, there's the entirely separate (and completely unsettling) sound of bullets ripping through your plane.

Perhaps the best sound is the gentle creaking of your plane as it moves through the air. It's not entirely accurate but it serves as a really nice cue for stalls and helps to bring home the stress of whipping your plane about in the air.

In the air there's a great deal to see as well. The sun flares perfectly and does an excellent job of seeming to be constantly moving without being too overt. Rays of light radiate out and waver back and forth ever so slightly.

The cloud model is probably the best we've ever seen, with huge masses of clouds serving not only as eye candy, but also as a unique strategic resource. Weather effects are also thrilling with snow and rain flying past your canopy and lightning flashing off in the distance.

I could go on and on and on and on…but I'm sure you've gotten the point by now. And you don't need an absolute beast of a machine to run CFS 3 in all its retina-bursting glory.

Anything above a 1.3Ghz with some kind of Geforce4 is enough to play at a consistent 40fps and anyone with a machine above these specs will just get better frame rates. Unfortunately, the ground textures need some work.

The snow textures seem to be the worst offenders, looking like someone has smeared your screen with vaseline, especially at high altitudes, while the grass and land textures are a mixed bag, going from quite acceptable, to shockingly bad, to excellent in the space of a kilometer.

There are plenty of planes on offer too, ranging from Michelins to Messcherschmidts, and there are now torpedo planes, which are cool. However, and this is sure to annoy some WW2 enthusiasts, there is no B-17!

How can you fight World War II without the B-17, I ask you? It's like fighting World War 1 without bullets. To compensate, Microsoft have introduced some late model planes like the Vampire, circa the start of the Korean War, which, while fun to fly, kinda kill the atmosphere.

Rather than using CFS3 as some sort of springboard for a Korean War campaign, they should have used the time spent rendering these fine examples of 1953 aerial warfare in more productive ways, like fixing the strange "projectile lag" effect, which sees bullets fired from the turrets of particular planes lag behind the crosshair much more than speed and direction would otherwise dictate.

When you're not actually flying, you're planning your next mission. In CFS2, you started off your army career as a lowly pilot and had to carefully wait until a shortage of manpower on the front tossed you to the position of squadron leader.

In CFS3, there is no such time wasting, and you start off as commander of your particular squadron.

You obtain "prestige" points by bombing enemy factories, convoys etc. and protecting your own factories and armed forces, and you can even use the points gained by doing so to plan and carry out your own missions by redirecting tank columns, requesting extra planes from HQ and more.

Unfortunately, there are no filters for finding enemy interests, and you have to become good at reading the map very fast if you want to use the interface with any kind of success rate.

A downside of the whole prestige system is that it costs so much prestige to move the front forward a tiny bit that you will see very little movement on the front for most of the campaign.

The AI isn't the smartest piece of C++ coding ever seen, and becomes somewhat predictable, especially towards the end of a large-scale dogfight.

It's a pity that you can't play the campaign co-operatively with a friend, restricted as you are to co-op generated skirmishes. The skirmishes aren't all that creative, and neither are the historical missions.

The latter missions deal with speculative or hypothetical situations, sort of like those games where you get to play as Napoleon at Waterloo and try to change the course of history. The quality of these missions ranges from bad to quite decent, but there is definite leaning towards bombing runs. To make this even more obvious, there is only one mission where you get to a torpedo run.

CFS3 isn't the final word in flight sims, but it is a good game. While it is surpassed by IL2-Sturmovik in a few technical areas, for a combination of beautiful graphics and good gameplay, you really can't go past Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 3.

ORIGINALITY 75%
SOUND/GRAPHICS 90%
PLAYABILITY 85%
ADDICTION 80%
ENJOYMENT 80%