First Impressions:

Graphics:

The Cat gives this area both a Pro and a Con. The first area of innovation here is the fully mouse-clickable 3-D cockpit, the first of its kind in a flight sim. About every switch or button you can think of is here. Many virtual pilots have panned the cockpit for its flat lack of detail, however beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the ability to smoothly thumb-hat your view around the cockpit more than makes up for the lack of slick looks, in my view. Spartan and utilitarian, the cockpit in the screenshots was enhanced by a third-party addon by Buddman, available through Limech’s Jane’s page. The sim features gorgeous sunsets and sunrises, 3-D volumetric clouds, lightning spikes when it’s stormy and leaping fires when something flammable explodes. It boasts spectral and point lighting (see the HARM launch to your immediate right and note the afterburners glowing on the tailfins in the over-the-shoulder shot), and the sun glitters off the water beneath you. The Con-- you gotta have a bunch of horsepower to run it. My Katmai Pentium III/500 rig has a Hercules Prophet GeForce DDR aboard and 256mb RAM, and sometimes gets bogged down.

Sound/Music:

The voices are awesome! See Marketing Efforts Towards Women below.

Gameplay:

Flight Model/Avionics: According to lead designer Chris Martin, F/A-18 was tested and approved by an active duty Hornet pilot. The flight model is crisp and responsive. It is also steady, and does not respond too fast or too slow to control inputs. Weight penalties from munitions and fuel tankage is modeled, and one cannot pull nine g’s with a full load of bombs. The avionics suite is the best of any game out there. Electronic countermeasures include air-launched drones, towed decoys and an onboard jammer that actually works. For someone (like myself) who is into ironhand (anti-surface-to-air missile) work, the ability to use standard SAM evasion techniques such as Doppler notch (putting the missile on the three or nine o’clock to keep Doppler radars from being able to detect relative motion, making the aircraft invisible) and terrain masking (using terrain features to shield your bird from enemy radar) really upgrade your survivability in a high-threat environment. Global-positioning targeting systems, forward-looking infrared cameras, and most types of iron bombs provide the player the means to simulate about any type of mission she sees on CNN. Attention to detail includes the Sparrow air-to-air missile’s home-on-jam capability, with this the first simulation to model this weapon’s ability to home on enemy jamming. The HARM anti-radar missile features all three real-life modes of operation, being able to attack pre-briefed targets, set up on the fly for opportunity fire, and run in the background to self-protect you when an enemy radar locks you up. And look out when you try to land this bird in a storm-- the aircraft carrier moves in three dimensions. Without implementation of the real-life Automatic Carrier Landing System (they did that too), I would never be able to land this bird. Ten out of ten here.

Mission Editor: I give this area high marks. You can make missions of incredible detail in this full-featured editor. You can assign a U.S. Marine forward air controller to spot for you on the ground. You can set up a paratroop drop and watch the 82nd Airborne float in. Ships can move and fight-- not only you, but each other if they get close enough. Same goes for enemy ground forces. Aircraft can be given waypoints and mission timing to do anything from stand-off jam (the EA-6 Prowler) to bomb targets. You have not only U.S. Navy, but Air Force and Marines, British Royal Air Force, Finish and Norwegian air forces, and both good and bad Russians. There is an undocumented campaign editor as well, however one has to search the internet to learn how to use that.

Comms/Wingman Control: Again, the team did well here. The artificial intelligence is the best in any current sim I’ve seen. When you tell a wingman to do something, he or she does it. When you’re fighting other aircraft or SAMs on a high setting, prepare to die if you aren’t very, very good. The comms are set up well for one who uses voice-activated software like Game Commander, however if you use the menu-driven system you’ve got problems when the heat’s on. Some of the menus are three and four tiers deep. With detail comes a price. For people who use a Hands-On Throttle and Stick combo, like a Thrustmaster system, you can map the commands to buttons on your stick.

The biggest cons are the inability to set up varying instant action missions and the static campaign. The instant action missions are canned, but with some selectable variables, and the lack of a dynamic campaign has turned a lot of virtual fliers against this product. Don’t believe the hype--this is a good flight experience. However, be warned: it is a hardcore, very detailed simulation. To get the most of it, you will have to put in some time reading the very detailed manual and learning systems. Thankfully, there is a pause key, so when you’ve AUTO-LOFTED that Walleye glide bomb to the wrong place, you can pause, uncage the seeker, fine-tune the aim, recage and unpause at your leisure. The sim does have a casual mode for those looking for the arcade experience, however in my mind you’ll have more fun in the long run if you learn the systems and fly in maximum realism. Finally, be sure you have a fourth-generation video card such as a GeForce or Voodoo3 before you buy a ticket to this game. This sim is a CPU hog. There is no way around it. These graphics demand power. And the graphic art that came with the sim can be very dark and hard to read-- thankfully the French CHECK-SIX site on the Web has come out with a palette fix that changes all that. Now, if we can get Jane’s/EA to give us a way to get the Iraq campaign from F-15 into the game, I’d be happy-- the campaign is set in the Kola Peninsula, near Russia and the Arctic. Frankly, I’d rather bomb the Taliban or other known misogynistic fanatics! The last con is the sound-- those great explosion graphics deserve earth-shaking kabooms to go along with them, and we haven’t got that here.

Enjoyment:

I have had the pleasure to fly every title this label has come out with since ATF-Gold was released in 1996. F/A-18 is based on Andy Hollis’s F-15 title that EA’s Origin Systems division released in 1997. Enormously successful due to what was then a ground-breaking graphics engine, F-15 was beginning to get a little long in the tooth by the Voodoo-3/GeForce 256 driven systems of three years later. F/A-18 delivers on its predecessor’s promise.

Multiplayer:

You can play in cooperative mode as well as head-to-head. The multiplayer aspect of this game was not explored for this review.

Overall Impression:

Customer Service: Jane’s is known for bug-free sims. Some of their latest releases caused one to think their quality control department was on vacation. However, F/A-18 shipped with only a couple of serious bugs, none of which rendered the game completely unplayable, and a patch has since been released that corrects the majority of them.

Marketing Efforts Towards Women:

For female pilots like myself, F/A-18 is one of the two combat flight simulations out there that allows gamers the option of actually having a female lead pilot speak the lingo! Only here and in Microprose’s Falcon 4 have we had that comparative luxury. Kudos to EA/Jane’s for realizing that women fly in this man’s Navy today! Ten out of ten in this category.