"On Parade" continues

YET MORE REVIEWS.

I’ve always been a huge fan of all the "Jane’s" titles available. From ATF, ATF Anthology, Longbow 1 & 2, through to Israeli Air Force and 668(I) hunter/Killer. So it was no surprise to anyone when I was the first kid on the block to pick up a copy of Jane’s WW2 Fighters, (JWW2F).
The question has to be asked; was I disappointed? Well, no & Yes. Confused? Well read on.

First of all lets look at the positives.
GRAPHICS. Without a doubt, this has the best eye candy off all WW2 flight sims, or any flight sim for that matter. To put it bluntly it kicks heads in a BIG way.Just check these screen shots I captured from a few missions I recently flew.

JWW2F eats the competition alive in this area. Flaps move, undercarriage unfolds smoothly from beneath the aircraft, (the people at Jane’s even got the "uneven" retraction of the ME 109’s gear right), and jettisoned canopy’s tumble away from the stricken fighters revealing the interior of the cockpit! I was truly amazed to fly through a formation of B17’s & B24’s and see aircrew tucked up and tumbling past me as their bombers broke up in midair, exposing wires and internal framing.
SOUND EFFECTS. Again; AWSOME! Cannon thumps away and engines roar. The chatter from the other pilots is also very good with "…I saw number one go down,……I saw ‘chutes!"
Germans chatter away in German, Brits sound British, (and not like the ponsy twits in European Air War), and Yanks, well, they sound like Yanks.
GAME PLAY. A strong point in my opinion. More difficult to come to grips with initially than say EAW, but still very good. I have read reviews that say the aircraft in JWW2F are not realistically flight modeled; all I can say is that they seem to fly realistically to me.

Now for the negatives.
You can only fly in one theater of Operations, that being during the Battle of the Bulge. Why Jane’s limited themselves (and us) in this way is anyone’s guess, but the cynic in me would suggest that they plan to release add-ons or maybe there is a JWW2F GOLD with more Theaters and more Aircraft in the not to distant future. Speaking of more aircraft, you can fly the Spitfire, the P51 P38 P47 on the Allies side and the Germans get the ME109, FW190 and the ME262. Not nearly enough in my opinion. At least in EAW you get to fly 3 different versions of the ME109, two versions of the FW190, two versions of the P51, P47, P38 & Spitfire. In addition to that you also get the Tempest Typhoon and Hurricane. Both EAW & JWW2F give you the ME262. There also seems to be better support on the net for EAW, (though this is provided by dedicated gamer’s rather than Microprose).

In conclusion; a great sim despite its shortcomings, with the best graphics I have every seen in a flight sim. I would have to say JWW2F runs a VERY close second to EAW, and is clearly superior to Microsoft’s Combat Flight Sim. 9 out of 10

This review was done on a HP Pavilion 6306 System, using a AMD K6-2 CPU, 32 Meg Ram & 16 Meg PCI "Monster Fusion" 3D FX Card

A bad day at the office!

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