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FLANKER 2.0 By JAMES
ANTHONY It's sheer size has always been frightening. Any nation that can put together so much armor and so many aircraft and troops at any one point has got to be looked at warily, but in terms of quality, sorry miss, wrong house. Two classic examples of the Russian military giant being over confident of its own abilities have been against tiny nations with very little in the way of technology - Afghanistan and Chechnya. The latter is particularly small and yet despite massive efforts by Moscow still continues, albeit by the fingernails, to hold on. Recently, however, the
it's-Russian-so-it's-crap attitude took a big change in direction when
hopping into the virtual cockpit of an Su-27 Flanker. Hmmm, the writing Even more exciting is the gameplay, which can have you up zooming about some of the best visuals your eyes have witnessed. In fact, the graphics in Flanker 2 are probably the highest quality yet provided for a flight sim. Terrain rendering is excellent with buildings and ground units looking exceptionally sharp and detailed. Flanker 2 has a huge number of missions to fly, as Russia, Ukraine, USA or Turkey, and you can mix and match planes to get either the best jet to fly or the best plane to fly against. There is, of course, the Su-27, the Su-33, MiGs, Tupolevs, Illyushins, F-14s through to the F117 stealth fighter bombers and A-10 Warthog ground-attack craft. For added adventure you can pick C-130 transports or B-52 bombers to take on and it has to be said knocking out those monsters with cannons only is one heck of a lot of fun.
Get stuck in to trucks, armoured personnel carriers and trains, or go naval and pick on patrol boats, cruisers, missile platforms and carriers. Flanker 2 covers just about everything you would want to do or blow up in modern air warfare and is extremely good value for money.
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Flying the Flanker is reasonably easy to pick
up and with the manual open on the desk you you can pretty much get
started straight away. That's on the simpleton level, of course, and you
can make life as difficult for yourself as you need to. While air-to-air
combat is the mainstay of any flight simulation, the addition of other
types of mission separates the very good from the must buy. With Flanker 2
you not only get a host of air targets to take on, but also the game
serves up ground units, radar sites and shipping for you to set your
sights on. And, the beauty is that the graphics are so good you are not
just blowing blocky shapes into smithereens but very well rendered
about-be-atoms. 
