flight

I've got the first 2 entries in the CFS series, and have mixed feelings about each of them. I suspect that the series takes a radically new turn in CFS3, but I can't be sure. CFS1 and CFS2 look and fly pretty much the same - building a military flight sim out of the tried and true MS Flight Simulator engine (which has the double benefit of feeling and looking real AND the ability to add-on 3rd party aircraft). Unfortunately, the developers took the concept of "MS Flight Simulator with guns" too seriously and never craft much of a military sim to go with the engine - the missions are canned and the campaigns are not only scripted, but short. In CFS: Europe, you can fly allied or axis missions in one of two campaigns - the Battle of Britain (mostly over southern UK, summer-early fall, 1940) or the one for western Europe, 1943. Though the lack of American missions are understandable for the first campaign (Pearl Harbor was still over a year away when the "Battle of Britain" came to an end) the lack of flyable British missions in the second campaign is odd. As a yankee, you'll start out flying the not-very-spritely P-47, before progressing to the faster and more nimble Mustang (and boy, will you feel the difference). Bombers appear in the game, but CFS is strictly a fighter-flyable affair. Ofcourse, if you want to tweak the game yourself, you can find scenery, aircraft and missions to suit your tastes, but that still doesn't excuse how bare a sim CFS is - it's almost as if the programmers decided that there was no point to adding in a wider variety of planes, weapons, scenery or campaigns since they knew that serious users would do it themselves. The game engine is pretty, and allows hardcore users to take real control of their planes (start-up, manifold pressure, mixture, et. al.), but it's nothing spectacular. Ground modeling looks pretty, but there's little complexity to it - bit-mapped images (and not much variety to them) "painted" on naturally irregular topography. Ground targets have very basic damage modeling - hit them enough and they just disappear in unconvincing, "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" style fireballs. Some of the missions seem a tad unrealistic - sending short-ranged Spitfires on strafing missions across the channel when the RAF had barely enough fighters of any kind to stem the tide of Luftwaffe bombers? The missions are also repetitive, though real WWII pilots probably flew an even lower variety of missions than you'll find flying a single tour here. Still, your American bomber formations always meet a small number of the same kinds of fighters - FW-190's and Me-109's. The early German jets appear - but only as ground targets in a late-war mission. You can add AI (that is, non-flyable) aircraft as well, but not as easily. The variety of add-on planes is as limitless as the imagination of the flight-sim community, but is otherwise constrained by the fact that this is a WWII sim. That means that you can fly F-14's against Mitsubishi A6M's ("Splash the Zeros, I say again, SPLASH the Zeroes!"), but you can forget about using the complex sensor suites and sophisticated weapons of modern aircraft on this game (and, as with all entries of the MS Flight Sim series, vertical movers like helos or Harriers are limited in terms of simulating hover-flight). Flight is challenging, but slidable realism allows newbies a softer learning curve. The fluid sense of flight is lacking though - with cloud effects looking less convincing than those used on "EF2000" from 1996. Better effects were found in "Jane's WWII Fighters" which also had more compelling enemies, and a more dynamic campaign (if a more prosaic flight engine).

In short, this is a basic game - good for those who want a simple and fun WWII sim, but can't run the Jane's game.