GameSpot editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 11/01/2002
- Released on: 10/27/2002
- Originally published on GameSpot: Strike Fighters: Project 1 (PC) Review
Strike Fighters: Project 1 has already been released once, in a fiasco in which an early version was put in a box and sold at the retail chain Wal-Mart to meet a shipping deadline and then withdrawn just as quickly. Three months later, the game is back as an "official release." And unfortunately, Strike Fighters might be the only game that has ever been released twice in an unfinished state.
The idea behind the game itself is great: Take a period in aviation history that hasn't gotten a lot of attention in flight simulator games and build an expandable simulation that revolves around some of the most interesting and beloved aircraft of the time. In true survey-sim fashion, Strike Fighters avoids turning into a gadget show that requires you to fiddle with a thousand knobs and buttons on your planes' control panels, and this approach is actually pretty realistic, since the avionics in the real-world aircraft featured in Strike Fighters were fairly primitive in the first place. And development of the game involved Tsuyoshi Kawahito, the designer of the classic European Air War and the programmer of the even more highly esteemed Longbow 2, so Strike Fighters had the potential to be an absolutely essential game for all computer pilots. If the game had actually been finished by the time it was shipped, this might have been the case.
Currently, Strike Fighters lets you fly four standard aircraft: the A-5 Skyhawk, the F-100 Super Sabre, the F-104 Starfighter, and the F-4 Phantom II (though in multiplayer, you can also fly Soviet-built MiG jets). The Phantom II is really the centerpiece of the sim, as it has a truly unique flight model: It has a lot of power, but it handles like a brick. If you played EA's 1999 simulation Jane's USAF, you may remember the physics on the Phantom II in that game--and as it turns out, Strike Fighters does a better job of conveying the way this powerful fighter jet handles. In fact, Strike Fighters does a great job of modeling just about all the aircraft it features, and you really have to learn how to handle these early jets much differently than you would a modern F-22. These jets bleed airspeed like crazy, even in relatively shallow turns, and this is exacerbated by the fact that the Soviet-built planes generally have much more horizontal maneuverability than the other jets, so you have to play to your strengths.
Strike Fighters' modeling of air-to-air missiles gives you a good idea of how unreliable and difficult to use the early models were. Additionally, the realistic difficulty in using missiles in air-to-air battles leads to a lot of intense dogfights in which a missile launch rarely means an automatic kill, and in which guns are your most reliable asset. The challenges in the game aren't technical but a matter of flying skill, so you might compare it to Rowan Software's 1999 MiG Alley, since both games offer a new flight experience that hasn't been featured in a flight sim in a while.
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Strike Fighters: Project 1 (PC):
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