My Patience is Gone

Fitting nicely with the cheap sounds is the verbal dialogue over the radio. You get subtitles that cannot be turned off, with one different voice for each radio nationality with laughable attempts to disguise them.

Then it's a steady stream of silly remarks that sound like an aerial strip-tease. In the same voice it sounds as though one aircraft is slowly falling to pieces. You get: "My rudder's gone." "The fuel lines are gone." "The engine is done for." The flaps are gone."

You will laugh out loud when you fire at your own guys and you get the response "What are you playing at?" or "Stop shooting at me," in a most casual manner. You should be hearing an agitated "Cease fire!!" My favorite is "I can't hold it," with voice inflection in a rather casual tone. I keep thinking that it sounds like a kid who needs to go to the bathroom! I do not see why the audio team couldn't at least get some different voices such as the postman, the Fed X guy, the janitor, whoever!

Preferences and Difficulty.

CAMPAIGN BLUES

Keys are re-mappable for changing controls. The video resolution and sound levels can be quickly changed in the setup screen. Setting for difficulty and realism are changeable beginning with each mission instead of being locked in for the whole campaign. Fighter Command scores high in convenience here.

The campaigns seem to be just a bunch of missions thrown together. While you get a total of kills after each mission, there is no running tally. There is a screen that breaks down your ordnance hit percentages, but as with kills, there is no cumulative total. But I noticed that rounds expended vs. actual ordnance carried in real-world aircraft is way too optimistic. Secret Weapons Of The Luftwaffe did better here with a cumulative career total.

You are arbitrarily put into different planes and war theaters as you go trough the career. There is no cohesive feel of a campaign with only fifteen missions anyway. The map has a senseless look of graph paper that really tells nothing pertinent.

On single missions there is no final personal tally of bandits destroyed, only a squadron total which leaves you wondering. There is simply no immersion. And the navigation screens in pre-flight are like the sim: gothic dark. The use of dark, drab colors here gives the overall warmth of Dracula's castle.

Flight Models, Wingmen

Flying the aircraft is generally a lackluster exercise. Case in point my pet Me 163. With limited fuel you use short bursts of throttle and glide as did the real rocket plane. Not so in Fighter Command. Chopping the throttle at 700 KPH will drag you down to 200KPH in seconds, very unrealistically. Other non-jets not as streamlined as the 163 glide with better inertia than it does.

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Locating the Target for a Raid.

There is an under-powered feel in most of the flight models to me. Perhaps force feedback controls would help a bit. An attempt is made to compensate with eye-candy: when you die the explosion is unsurpassed in special effects.

Ground Support.

There are only four radio commands to your wingmen and they are vague at best. I never really could confirm action taken after asking for help. There is no decisive A.I. answer.

Couple this with the fact that many missions begin and end with your aircraft in the air and you get a detached feel to the whole thing. Even though SWOTL began missions in the air you could land upon return to base. In Fighter Command you have no clue as to where your airfield is. Instead of modeling reality Nations models virtual reality, divorcing the experience from anchors that would immerse you in the virtual world.

P51 getting airborne.

In combat there is a target track feature that works haphazardly. Toggle it on and you see large insignias for each friendly and enemy plane in the air. When it's off you can see almost nothing save for a glint of reflected light off a distant, unseen aircraft. There is a range when closing that the insignia will fade out and then you can see the plane itself. The enemy is allegedly in range then.

In transition it is disconcerting. The gun sight cross hair turns green for enemy and white for friendly aircraft and contracts/dilates if placed on a target, but not according to range. It does this even when the target is unseen though so you really have no idea what is going on. Some of the reflector lenses where the crosshairs reticule is placed are darkly tinted. This is yet another thing to make forward vision poor.

Go to Page Four.