It's been a little while since our last look at Fighter Squadron, and the game has been progressing along very nicely. This preview isn't meant to give an overall feel for the game so much as it is to graphically illustrate some of the more interesting points about the game.

The menu is simple, but full of atmosphere. Playing in the background are lots of WW2-era radio broadcasts. You'll find yourself treated to recordings varying from news announcements to public addresses from Churchill and Hitler. The game itself now has the option of music while you play, although the in-game music feels very Mechwarrior 2-ish

The Typhoon has some of the heaviest firepower of any Allied fighter and those six foot plumes of fire sure help accentuate that.

Fighter Squadron uses a very innovative padlock. The following sequence should help illustrate how it works. The further you look off to one side, the wider your field-of-view is. This helps you maneuver around with enhanced peripheral vision in rough dogfights. As you bring your nose to bear on the target, your view zooms in closer and closer, giving a more detailed view. Notice how large your sight gets by the third picture.

If you shut down the engine, the furiously windmilling prop threatens to wreck your engine until you feather it.

Landing is something else in this game. Touchdowns and takeoffs have the same kind of fluid feel that veterans will remember from Parsoft's last project, A-10 Cuba!. On the ground, the landing gear suspension compresses and wallows, while the nose- or tailwheel steers the aircraft in a realistic fashion. It seems like Parsoft could take on Papyrus if they wanted to.

The graphics engine - particulary the terrain engine - is difficult to describe properly. The mottled textures are simple but effective. The terrain shape is the most crennellated and detailed of what we've seen so far, but the textures are a bit plain. Overall, one could say that the arenas you fight in have a "level design" kind of detailed feel to them, almost like a sim version of a Quake-engined game.

For those of you just itching to get a flyable B-17, this one's for you.

The cockpit from the co-pilot's view. Similar to WW2 Fighters, you can not only pan the view around the whole suite of instruments, but also "adjust the seat" in most any direction.

Ooops. In trying to demonstrate wing flex from pulling G's, I got a little boorish on the stick and sheared the wings right off. They're not visible in this shot, but they're trailing behind, fluttering down to the ground with their own unique physics models.

Look really close and you can just make out a stick of bombs. They're splayed out from wobbling after release. The similarity to historical bomb-bay footage is just uncanny.

Splash! The bomb impacts have a very believable dispersion to them.

One very interesting thing that you'll notice in the ball turret (but doesn't show up well in photos), is that the bullets fired from the guns move according to the bomber's speed and motion as well as the impulse from the gun. The net effect is another gameplay aspect that looks and feels like something from a historical documentary. In this case it behaves like tracer fire from the miniguns on a AC130 Spectre gunship.

How the game will come together as a whole has yet to be seen, but if our previews are any indication, Fighter Squadron will at least offer interesting and unique gameplay experiences for fighter fans, as well as the first new bomber experience in years for fans of the "big friends".