by D. Eric Marlow, "Snacko" January 11th, 2000

  I was keen on Super Hornet's included pilot statistics area. The area allows you to save statistics, and it includes such items as total number of missions flown, how many successful missions, how many outstanding missions, and how many failed missions - these statistics are accumulated for both training and combat missions.

Also accumulated are enemy and friendly (yikes!) kills and logged flight/combat time. I would have liked to see a carrier trap board to observe how my landing skills progress over time.

The padlock system is spartan, and is akin to the padlock of Falcon 3.0. What SH has in allowing the pilot to cycle padlocked air targets (while maintaining separate targets locked on radar) it lacks in allowing the pilot to padlock incoming missile threats, ground targets, and runways.

I was disappointed to find out that I could not customize the keys commands. I like this feature, not so much because I like changing the key assignments, but rather I like to have a reference for HOTAS programming. Since the keycard for SH is for all intents and purposes unusable, and because of the differences in UK vs. US keyboards, this feature is a necessity.

Graphics Quality and Support

Super Hornet is a Direct3D game, clean and simple - the Glide API is not supported. In fact, I had difficulty getting SH to recognize passthrough Voodoo 2 cards on two different machines. It only wanted to recognize the primary video card. If your only means of graphics acceleration is a passthrough Voodoo card, you may want to hold off until a patch better addresses this issue.

Three resolution modes are supported: 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768. Frame rates were quite acceptable on my system (see below) with max options and the 1024x768 resolution.

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I enjoyed the object explosions. Though the explosions didn't model the inertia of falling debris, the flame and wreckage effects were quite nice.

One of the biggest complaints about SH is the terrain engine. A patchwork of repetitive greens and browns make up the game world, and the included ground textures are uninspired. This is compounded with low object density; there aren't that many objects on the ground.

I was, however, quite in awe of the detailed nature of the F/A-18 aircraft modeled in Super Hornet. Using dynamic lighting and subtle textures, the aircraft object is one of the best rendered anywhere. The F/A-18 spouts articulated surfaces, as well as well-modeled landing gear, hook, and speed brakes.

The rendering of flares is poor, as they are a simple starburst with no smoke trail. The default gamma setting are quite dark and I had to adjust the game configuration gamma slider to around 85 for the world to become visible. The fonts that were chosen for the HUD and DDIs are a bit small, and not very distinct - telling the difference between an "S" and a "5" is but one example of difficultly in reading the fonts.

Go to Part V: Sound and Realism