F-16 Aggressor

One of the craziest things I learned about F-16 Aggressor is that Bethesda actually published this back in 1999! This is a hardcore flight sim that is all based around the badass F-16 Aggressor fighter jet. My dad loved these flight sims when I was a kid growing up and I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with them. Still, I went into this one with an open mind and thinking that as it is based on a fighter jet it could be fun.

The Jet, Chicks Dig The Jet

This is a game that was released back in 1999 and at the time it was heralded for its great visuals. Flight sims always try to look as realistic as possible and F-16 Aggressor is no different. The actual jet looks fantastic, but the different locations you will be flying over also look great. For me, Africa, in particular, had a lot of detail about it and I thought it was cool.

Your cockpit view looks really cool and I liked how as well as seeing all of your instruments you can also see your legs. It might now sound like much, but I liked this and felt it was a cool feature as you usually just see the instruments.

Take Them All Down!

The structure of F-16 Aggressor is very strange. It feels like they wanted to make the “story” and the missions of the game be as action packed as possible. It was also supposed to have un upgrade system where you earned money as you played and you could use this to upgrade your jet. This is not actually in the game and while you still earn money this is more of a rating of how you did than any way to progress.

As you are flying a fighter jet, you will, of course, be taking part in dogfights. These can be quite exciting, but I think they needed to do more in the way of narrative here. Sometimes the mission you have to do flashes up on the screen goes away and you have no idea what you are supposed to do.

Taking To The Sky

Even though you are piloting a fighter jet this is not an arcade-style flying game like an Afterburner or an Ace Combat. What we have here is a full simulation game and as a result, there is a serious learning curve here. Even with the tutorial, certain actions like firing your missiles require multiple button presses that can take a while to learn.

Pros:

• The game looks great
• The F-16 Aggressor jet is really badass looking
• The different locations look great
• The sound effects are super loud which is cool
• I am sure flight sim fans will love it

Cons:

• The learning curve is really steep
• The missions are kind of boring

Flight simulators are supposed to let you pretend that you're really flying an aircraft. They do this in two main ways: they use very realistic graphics so you don't have to rely on your own imagination, and they provide a flight model which includes details on how good gravity is at dragging you down and how the plane works against it. It is tempting to bang on about the graphics quality of flight simulators, because it's the first thing that hits you and it's easy to make a judgement.

Ooh," you say, I can fly through the clouds"; Golly, the vapour trail on that missile that just missed me is realistic; My, I'm blacking out because I've pulled up too fast. These features are just nice little extras compared to how realistic your vehicle flies. But F-16 Aggressor has all the posh effects plus a remarkably realistic flight engine. Virgin have whispered that they actually had to cripple the flight model slightly because some people" would have objected to us knowing about certain special features. Well, I've flown some real military aircraft in my time (back in 'Nam etc), and there's nothing as scary as filling your pants as an opponent locks on to you -even in an exercise - but F-16 Aggressor comes pretty close to the mark for a PC simulation. Unless you're the sort of Ccharacter' who builds his or her own virtual reality jet in the spare room and knows all the ins and outs of the F-16 Falcon, this is as realistic as it gets. In real life you don't notice the quality of the paintwork on your opponent's plane, so feel free to turn down the detail if things seem slow. It should then run happily on something like a Pentium 100. In summary, then, it's realistic, it looks good, and it is good.