Since I now have a joystick, even if it is the super cheap Logitech Extreme 3D Pro, I thought I ought to try a proper flight simulator game at least once. This is an old but still reasonably well respected game and it’s available on Steam. I also thought that flying World War II-era planes would be simpler, without all of the complicated electronics, and it has a career mode which looks like it could be fun.
As only to be expected, this being a serious game that is part of a long series with its own enthusiast community, starting this up is a daunting, very newbie-unfriendly experience. There are no tutorials nor even any guide as to how the controls are set up. Reading the manual is a must, something that I haven’t done for over a decade at least, but to find it I had to go looking into the game’s official forums. Thankfully, you can go onto Steam to download player-made tutorial missions after you have chosen a specific plane to fly. I made the usual and boring pick of the Bf-109 because it’s powerful and its engine management is automated. These missions very simple but do a good enough job of providing basic instructions on how to take off, land, move around, bomb a ground target etc. Surprisingly one of the toughest challenges is taxiing on the runway because the Bf-109 is so finicky with its narrow wheelbase. It’s a real nightmare to handle on the ground with the tail wheel unlocked.
You can move to more training using the quick missions generator, which allow you to set up simple scenarios, adding different types and numbers of enemies and so on. For full immersion, you’re supposed to fly with all user interface aids turned off but I quickly realized that this is step too far into realism for me. It’s pretty much impossible for me to recognize which planes are enemies and which are friends by squinting at those little pixels and heaven forbid I attempt to navigate back to my home base without having a convenient waypoint marker on the map. The game remains plenty challenging to me with the realistic flight physics, AI pilots who can fly more precisely than me and who possess a wider range of aerobatic maneuvers they know, the ridiculously complete damage model, having to deal with light and weather conditions and so on.
The career mode has you play as a pilot across several months of a campaign, racking up medals and getting promoted as you successfully accomplish missions and get kills. There’s actually not much of a difference in the missions here except that they’re generated for you and sometimes absolutely nothing happens in a mission. For example, you could be assigned to cover the ground troops and if no enemy planes show up, then you just spend some time circling the area and then you go home. I suppose it is immersive and you can turn up the time acceleration during those long distance missions when you need to escort bombers. But it can get boring when you get assigned the same missions to the same zones over and over again and getting through the entire campaign is a slog as it’s something like four months. You can expect to fly at least one mission per day and sometimes two and of course no matter how well or how badly you do, you can’t change the course of the war which is scripted. You’re just one tiny cog in a huge machine after all.
Having never flown a realistic sim of any quality, I have to say that the experience is quite eye-opening. Flying around, taking off and after some practice, even landing, isn’t that hard but you do quickly realize that flying a plane is nothing like flying a spaceship. You have to think about gravity and control surfaces. The fastest way of changing your speed isn’t with the throttle but by changing which direction the nose is pointed at. Being high above an enemy makes you almost invulnerable as planes can’t keep their noses pointed up for very long but you can point your nose down. In a game like Elite Dangerous, I use yaw all the time to fine-tune the ship’s position but here you mostly use it to ensure that the aircraft is coordinated while turning and to counteract external yaw effects from wind and the like.
That’s not even counting the complex aeronautical maneuvers like vertical loops and crazy spirals. These are a lot harder to pull off than you’d think because it’s easy to stall or your pilot get knocked unconscious from the g-forces. You have to understand the performance limits of your aircraft and how it compares with the capabilities of other aircraft. Plus of course you need to have incredible focus and coordination to line up a shot. There’s so much to learn and I admit that even now I’m usually forced to resort to turning dogfights against enemies even though that’s the last thing I should do in a Bf-109 because that is the only thing I really know how to do. I know you’re supposed to at least do a boom and zoom in a Bf-109, taking advantage of its more powerful engines but it’s so hard to shoot accurately when moving past an opponent at such high speeds. And all this is just for one plane and I haven’t even touched developing the skills needed to attack ground targets.
It’s pretty clear to me that this is the kind of game where getting good at it means playing it almost exclusively and practising for months and months on end. It would also pay to invest in the proper equipment. My Logitech Extreme 3D Pro for example simply doesn’t respond in a consistent enough manner. Most people would also agree that a TrackIR device is mandatory to be able to look around the cockpit while flying. When dogfighting, you always want to keep your eyes on the enemy to see exactly what he is doing and where he is going. For some reason, I also had a lot of trouble remapping the controls for the elevator stabilizer to be able to use it in combat and I do know that this makes a huge difference in how agile your aircraft can be. There’s no way that I’m going to invest so much effort in this one game.
So dipping my toes in and trying it out will have to be good enough for me. I have no frame of reference to compare it to its peers but as far as I can tell this is perfectly awesome World War II flight sim. I will note that graphics-wise, the plans look incredibly realistic and the sky and weather effects are fantastic. However the ground isn’t detailed as it could be and flying over Stalingrad doesn’t really feel like flying over a city. You probably won’t want to fly around in this just to look at the scenery. This game really is all about the combat. Finally you can actually control tanks in this game but I don’t know why you would want to. I briefly checked it out and it seems like an incredibly frustrating experience as you have to see the world through a tiny porthole.
