This flight simulator from Microsoft lets you fly over and through cities from all over the world (with the use of expansion packs to attain more cities than the 45 you get as standard with this game). The flight physics of this game as you may expect when coming from Microsoft are perfect, as it has been used to train pilots to fly the various aircraft contained within the game in real life.

There are quite a few different options within the game, there are mission and practice modes for example, where you can fly anywhere within the games limits. 45cities may not sound all that much, but you do get over 3000airports, and it would take you more than 24hours flying at maximum speed in the fastest aircraft on the game, to fly from one end of the game zone to the other. This should be enough even for the keener pilot’s amongst us.

You get a choice of 8 aircraft with the standard game pack, these include: Bell 206B JetRanger III helicopter, Cessna’s new 182 and the Learjet 45. All the physics models for each of the aircraft have been tested by pilots who have flown these plane’s in real life, to ensure maximum possible realism, to make the game as true to life as possible.

The landscape quality is quite reasonable, until you fly low, when the detail of the graphics on the ground are quite disappointing. Over all the graphics of the aircraft and the smoothness in F.P.S. is quite acceptable. The graphics are realistic without being overly detailed. All in all decent graphics but a bit on the plain side.

This game can be used with either a keyboard or a joystick, but I would not recommend that you use the keyboard, as otherwise it detracts from the feel of the rest of the game. For the way that the game plays, it is very light on system resources, needing only a reasonable 486 to be able to run. I would recommend that you run it on no less than a Pentium 133, to get decent performance out of the game, without sacrificing the detail level.

MARTIN-

Rivals:

Star Rating: HHHII

Producer: Microsoft

Required Spec:

Windows 95/98

486 DX2 66mhz,  MMX Pentium CPU (recommended)

8MB RAM, 16MB RAM (recommended)

Soundcard

SVGA Display, Direct3D graphics card(recommended)

2x CD-ROM, 24x CD-ROM (recommended)

75Mb Hard Drive space (recommended)