Jane's USAF - United States Air Force

Designed in very close collaboration with the USAF, Jane's latest is the best balanced flight simulator I've ever seen! More often than it would be reasonable to expect by now, flight simulators, tend or not to simulate, or to simulate "too much", meaning that they might loose all the playability...

The latest months have been very rich on superb flight simulators: Flight Unlimited 3 [FU3] - here referenced days 271099 and 271199 - is very hardcore and also very enjoyable, but bets it all on terrain realism and civil aviation, thus not attracting gamers keen on firing against everything that moves :)

Then, we had Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2000 [FS2000], also for civil planes, but including the Concorde, that might pump extra adrenalin @ Mach speeds... for those with very powerful hardware: you will NOT run it like a dream, unless using a very high end PC... in fact, the best PC you can buy today, won't probably be enough to play FS2000 with all the bells and whistles turned on! This is a serious problem for most people...

Until now, FU3 was my favorite simulator, but the very recent Jane's USAF, adds a LOT of diversity to your flying experiences, and plays much faster on most PCs, even when using older 3D acceleration hardware, such as the RIVA TNT! It flies like a dream!

For starters, the best thing on USAF are the great tutorials, organized in "basic", "fight" and "red" skills... The basic skills are not that basic, and you have to learn tech maneuvers, such as re-fueling on air! Check one of the pictures on your right... Again, you can learn a lot from these tutorials.

If you come from civil aviation simulators, like I did, the power of machines like the F22 or the F16, is damn impressive! These birds are fast, can climb 10000 feet in a matter of few seconds [it takes minutes to do it with the great Lake Renegade @ FU3], drink too much fuel, and have tremendous fire power. The daunting thing is learning all the radar modes, understanding the jargon for most of the offensive hardware, knowing a complex HUD... and worrying with NOT colliding with your wing men:)

But when you've finally understand how the planes flies, how the plane attacks, defends, and misleads enemy detection devices- which is something to take weeks of training... - you will be doing incredible real life missions over, for example, Vietnam! And what a "ride" they are!

Terrain in USAF is very simple, but it does looks good, thanks to smart textures. The only models on ground are the models of your targets, some points of interest, trees and generic structures. It is a simple, but very effective approach, that allows loads of detail on what does really matter, without having any negative impact on the overall game speed.

Another spectacular effect on Jane's USAF, is the force feedback support, at least for the Microsoft Sidewinder joystick... Try to fire a machine gun, and your stick will tremble [nothing new, right?]; but play afterburner, from any speed, and you will be kicked back, as the thrust powers the machine ahead [a slight novelty]; and do hard Gs turns, to feel a feedback, that other simulators are yet to sync with!

The game is yet to be patches, but Jane's already giving away a superb add-on: the Thunderbirds planes!

download Thunderbirds for USAF [9081 KB]

More, soon...