• Windows 95 operating system.
• IBM compatible Pentium 90 processor (Pentium 133 recommended for 3D accelerated mode)
• 16 MB of memory (24 recommended for 3D accelerated mode)
• Hard disc drive with at least 70 MB free space (180 MB for full installation)
• 2X CD-ROM drive
• Direct X compatible video card capable of 640 X 480 resolution and 256 colors, with 512 K or more of video memory (2D mode)
• Direct 3D compatible video card with 2 mega-bytes of video memory (3D accelerated mode)
• Mouse and joystick (planes can be flown with only a mouse, but a joystick is recommended)

Recommended Optional Equipment:

• Soundblaster-compatible sound card
• Dedicated game port
• Throttle and rudder controls
• Multifunction joystick, such as ThrustMaster FCS, CH Pro, etc.

Test System:

• P200 with 32 Megs Ram, 12X CD ROM.
• Creative Sound Blaster 16 Plug and Play sound card.
• ATI 3D XPression+ PC2TV graphics card.
• F22 Pro/TQS controllers.

What's New in Air Warrior III

• 3D Accelerated Gameplay - 640 X 480 in 65,000 colors.
• All new, fully texture-mapped aircraft exteriors.
• Realistic water textures.
• Improved land terrain - with farms and rugged mountains.
• Lifelike sky with special effects (fog, sunburst, etc.).
• Full-screen view (F7) now incorporates cockpit instruments.
• F3 key "tag" feature provides info on plane type and distance on-screen [real nice feature.
• Heads-up display of text-based radio communications and messages.
• Improved wingman and enemy AI.
• Network speech and voice recording during gun camera films.
• Online, Continuous Historical Action and Mini-Scenarios.
• 5 New Japanese planes: AGM2 Zero, B5N Kate, D3A1 & D3A2 Val, K143 Oscar.
• 6 New Campaigns: Pacific Theatre (Allies) - Grim Reapers, Jolly Rogers; (Axis) - Rising Sun, Falcons of the Sun. European Theatre (Allies)- Fame's Favored Few, Fortress Malta.
• TBF Avenger's, Kate, Betty, and B25 can now carry torpedoes!

Overall Summary:

AW2: Click the image for a larger shot...

This is going to be somewhat of an abbreviated review because Air Warrior III is really, in essence, simply a 3D enhanced version of Air Warrior II with a few expansions to planes, campaigns and functionality. If you have never experienced Air Warrior in any version, please go to my Air Warrior II Review now for a full background of the game and the on-line experience. Overall, Air Warrior in any format rules! As I said in my initial Air Warrior II review, if they came out a 3d enhanced version, I wouldn't turn it down. And now, here it is. Unfortunately, my ATI 3D Xpression+ PC2TV video card with 4MB of onboard memory just didn't have the chops to make the experience worthwhile. What I could see at 5 to 8 frames per second was really nice, but in the end I was forced to deselect my graphics accelerator in the Preferences Setup screen and just go with the software renderer (unfortunately my 3d board is out of date!). But enough summarizing, let's get into the details shall we?

To 3D or not to 3D?

If you've got the horsepower coupled with the proper graphics technology I would definitely upgrade to Air Warrior 3. If you are unsure about your graphic card's ability to keep up, check out this wonderful readme3d.txt file that comes with the help files now before you purchase it and later start blaming the poor performance on the game programmers. If you do have a decent graphics card, or you are willing to upgrade, you will simply be amazed at the detailing on the planes exteriors. Here's a closeup shot of my favourite ride, the P51-D, complete with carbon streaks coming off the cannon outlets and running back over the wing's leading edge. Equally impressive is the ground detailing. I just love the way you can see the footpaths in this shot of a B17-G doing a lazy turn over an idyllic looking sheep paddock cum airstrip.

Other things to note about the 3D graphics is the sky. Lens flares, fog, and clouds are nicely rendered, but don't be expecting too much variety here. It seems that in Air Warrior the time of day never changes and you'll never be able to hide in the shadow of a mountain. Two final areas of 3D graphic improvement are smoke and explosion effects. The smoke adds an interesting dimension to gameplay because unlike in Air Warrior II where you could approach directly from the rear on a wounded adversary's smoking tail and finish him off, the new smoke effects will blind you if try this approach. The ack explosion detailing under 3D acceleration is fairly impressive, where before you just saw blotchy puff balls that quickly dissapated, now you'll have to contend with extremely smudgy puffballs with orange and red flames inside them. These new explosion effects really impair vision and can be used to your advantage if you have a bandit on your six and provided the aack doesn't get you first.

Off-line Play Improvements:

What really stands out, for me at least, is the new F3 key tag option. With the F3 key you can cycle through all the planes surrounding you and tag them with a description of their plane and their distance. Now I really don't care what kind of plane my allies or enemies are flying, nor do I care about how far away they are since I can tell visually if I'm close enough to squeeze off a shot. What I like about this feature is that it solves one of my biggest gripes about Air Warrior, namely, the extreme difficulty of telling a plane dot from a shrapnel or ground dot. In Air Warrior planes don't appear as planes until you are within 1,000 feet of them. Of course you can try to line up the radar icon which appears on the top border of your screen with the dot, but in a twisting turning melee forget about it. This new feature solves this problem because now you will see the plane and distance info displayed directly to the right of the dot in question. Plus, the tag info will display in the color of the planes country color so you really don't have to read the info at all. Surprisingly, this feature is even more useful under 3D acceleration because the new richer ground textures quickly swallow up planes that are below you. Check out this shot of an unfortunate adversary who has been tagged for a molten lead enema.

Seeing is not believing, it's about staying alive . . .

The new F7 view (full screen mode) now incorporates your cockpit instruments. Not having these instruments available in Air Warrior II was a real bummer because although it gave you the best situational awareness, you couldn't take a quick peek at your airspeed, altimiter, and flap position while booming and zooming or yank and crank dogfights. If you wanted to find out this info you had to hit F5 or F6 but the disruption in your concentration usually resulted in losing contact with your target. This is now solved with the addition instruments to the F7 view. In fact, the new F7 instrument layout and design kicks butt over the old, smaller F5 mode with its funny looking instrument layout and F6's textual instrument printout. The only reason I can see for keeping F5 and F6 is for improved frame rates or force of habit.

Keep your head in the upright and locked position . . .

Artificial Flavouring Added . . .

Wingmen and enemy AI has been vastly improved in Air Warrior III. Now your AI wingmen and enemies will make their engagement and disengagement decisions based not only on the parameters of morale, attentiveness, and expertise, but they also take into account their energy state. This not only makes them smarter, but it also gives you an opportunity to employ your flying skills and knowledge of energy states to your advantage. I've noticed that it is actully easier to take out AI enemies because they just won't crank the joystick to evade you and lose all their speed. What also seems to have been improved in the AI is that wingmen will actually pick up on the old bait and drag for a change. Before, in Air Warrior II, wingmen seemed to be totally oblivious of your attempts to drag an nice juicy target into their sights. If another plane was a few feet closer, they'd take it instead and leave you to the wolves.

On-line Play Improvements

You Don't Say?

In my Air Warrior II review I said it would be really nice if the folks at Kesmai would add audible voice comms to the offline play. I still feel this way, I mean really, this is a game with one of the richest sound environments ever, yet the predominately on-line nature of the game has robbed us predominately off-line players of hearing our wingmen and radio operators back at headquarters because that's just not the way they do it on-line. Well, in a bit of a surprising move, Kesmai decided to implement real-time, full-duplex voice communications to the on-line play. Can you say Holy Shit!

If you can say it, and you have Network Speech enabled, your allied friends tuned to your channel will also hear you say it. All the radio channels between 700 and 999 are available for Network Speech in on-line play so it should be quite a blast to babble away to your wingie while you fly to the objective, and then scream your adrenaline raised voice comms while engaging bogies. I did manage to get this feature to work, but only off-line. You can use the Network Speech feature to record your running commentary during your gun camera films. For the uninitated, gun camera films are created when you press the 9 key while in flight. If you have a microphone and the proper sound card you're in business. So why didn't I try it on-line? Quite simply, although I got it to work off-line, the quality was soooo bad that I was afraid to try it on-line. I can only surmise that it was the lousy microphone that came with my computer. However, I did happen to notice a number of text chats between on-line players who said they did get Network Speech to work just fine. Who knows, maybe the on-line crowd will be able to tune into and listen to a present-day version of Tokyo Rose when they are flying over Japan . . . now wouldn't that be a hoot! Now, it we can just get a few canned off-line voice comms I'd really be happy.

There's more to flying a fighter plane than killing . . .

As much fun as it is to go on-line in Air Warrior II and do some serious killing of other on-line adversaries, this really isn't what WWII was all about (for the @generation, WWII is not another game by Kesmai, it was a real war). What was really important in WWII and remains just as important in today's high-tech air combat world, is the accomplishing of your mission objectives. Granted, sometimes mission objectives are to go up and kill every approaching bogie, but mostly, air combat in WWII and today is about patrolling, escorting, strafing and bombing.

Air Warrior III now has it's own on-line arena where you can participate in such campaigns where the accomplishment of your mission objectives will accrue more to your overall score than the number of kills you tally.

If you want, you could go there right now and take a look. All you have to do is go to www.bigweek.com, download the free Air Warrior frontend -- off-line mode not included--, install it then connect. Best of all, IT'S FREE. No on-line charges are levied because it's still in open beta.

Getting back to my story, these mini-scenarios as they are called are quite amazing. They start at specified times, I think 7, 9, and 11 pm EST. You'll want to get there early because available pilot slots in fighter planes and bombers fill up fast, as do gunner positions on the bombers. I tried the other night but I was too late to get in. Anyway, if you do get in, you'll be given your mission objectives and then you just sit and wait until the clock ticks down to launch time. When you do hit zero hour you'll be launched in the air and heading toward your first waypoint. This is where team work comes in.

Over and over I have heard from the on-line players that I have interviewed that the most rewarding and compelling feature of Air Warrior is the community atmosphere. This is due in large part to the permanent, 24 hour-a-day nature of the host server environment. But what really instills community spirit and fosters freindships with people you've never actually met is the fact that you can participate in large scale offensives where although your mission objectives aren't glamourous they are vital to the overall success of the campaign. Add to this the fact that in most mini-scenarios you are only allowed one life and you begin to see how important you are to your on-line allies and vice versa. People, lives even, albeit virtual, depend on your ability to accomplish your objectives. Therefore, if your job is to escort bombers and you are attacked by a swarm of Me109's you will be less interested in killing them as you are in breaking up their formation, protecting your wingman, and just generally annoying those harassing those Me109 pilots until they decide that getting to those bombers ain't worth the effort. If you succeed in keeping the wolves at bay and allow the bombers to drop their eggs on the target, you've succeeded and will be more valuable to your country than a fighter who breaks formation and kills ten enemy fighters but allows one bogey to get through and wipe out a whole bomber squadron.

Conclusion

Air Warrior II was a great sim despite it's graphic limitations. Now with 3D acceleration, the improved situational awareness features, better AI, and on-line historical play and mini-scenarios I believe it's even more worthwhile than ever. Add to this the fact that you really don't even have to buy it to enjoy it on-line (where the real fun is) and you can't go wrong. But I think that if you try the on-line version for free you'll still want to get the box version because then you can hone your flying and engagement skills so you won't get plastered everytime you go on-line like I did (and still do, frankly). If I could gripe about anything it would be the external view feature which, although nice to look at, doesn't allow you to fly in this mode. Each movement of the joystick while in external view not only makes your plane move but also makes the view move. Very annoying. I also found a bug in the campaigns which occured after saving a successful mission. When you return to the campaign and load the saved mission it will tell you that your charcter was lost. You can re-instate your character without affecting your score or the dynamic nature of the missions, but it does put a dent in your morale about things.

I also experience a let-down after completing the Jolly Rogers Campaign. After successfully completing the last mission I should have received some nice ending music and a morale-boosting cut screen. Neither happened and I was unceremoniously booted from the entire game back to Windows. I asked Jonathon Baron, producer of the game, about this and the lost character bug and he told me that their was indeed a bug related to the lost character scenario, but he had never heard of people not getting the pay-off music and screen at the end of the game.

What I don't like about the free on-line beta at bigweek.com is that the only free-for-all arena is in full realism. Although the marketing literature says it's fun to experience uncontrolled spins, I beg to differ. For a new comer to the community I would venture to say that it might put them off the on-line experience altogether. Fortunately the mini-scenarios have spins disabled.

One last thing about this game that I always fail to go into much depth about is the Mission Editor which comes with the boxed retail version. There is a new version of the Mission Editor in Air Warrior III which has some improvements over the original version. So, if you like to plan complex scenarios you'll enjoy this feature. With the mission editor you can create individual missions in any theater, specify wingmen and enemy parameters, waypoints, objectives, etc., etc., etc. If you get good at it you might even be asked to become a member of the scenario designers guild for designing on-line missions. Oh, and if you have the time, check out the AW3sheep.avi file on the CD. . . it's fascinating.