Cooler than Top Gun

Genre: Flight Sim

Created by: DID

Published by: Ocean

When EF 2000 was published, it caused a major shock in the flight sim industry. It was extremely realistic, so realistic that numerous fans were scared of it. Although I consider EF 2000 as the best flight simulator until the moment F22 ADF was released, EF 2000 wasn’t a monster succes. Now with F22 ADF, the people of DID chose a different path: You could compare it with a marriage of Jane’s and Novalogic. F22 ADF became a realistic sim, but much more accessable to more greenlookin’ pilots. The freaks however will be satisfied: In Hard mode you’ll get monstrous bogey AI, down-to-earth flight models and relatively unreliable weaponry. In Medium, the difficulty looks and feels like EF 2000. In Easy, you can blast the hostiles out of the sky, without the plane and avionics bothering you. The manual is also more human, not like those things which they use to cover New York when it rains. You’ll also receive a reference book of all the planes that appear in the game, and I can tell you: There are a lot of them! The book is very nice and is truely a collectors item. Now enough crap, let’s move on to the game itself, shall we?

The graphics of this game are definitely the best I’ve ever seen in a flight sim. And even without a 3DFX, everything looks beautiful and smooth. The lens-flares, canopy reflection, and missile tail smoke are all superb, and most of the effects are even made with software-rendering! The 3DFX version is, like most other games supporting 3DFX, better and smoother, but F22 ADF is the first game that actually looks stunning, even without such 3DFX thing. And to put this game to the ultimate test, I ran it on a Pentium 100 with 16 MB ram and a 2 MB graphics card. Recommended is a Pentium 200 with 32 Mb ram, a 4 Mb graphics card and a 3DFX, but I decided to give it a shot. And yes! It ran smooth in 320x200, good to mediocre in 640x480, yet kinda bad in 800x600. So, there you have it. The virtual cockpit also gives you a feeling that you’re really up there, collecting G’s. The dogfight are also very exciting, and the enemy’s are plentiful and very varied: From MIG’s and SU’s to stealth bombers, destroyers, and oil rigs. The missions include training, random, free flight, campaign, instant action and AWACS missions. In the AWACS missions you are the commander of an AWACS airplane, you now, those things with an overgrown frisbee on top. In these missions you can command the allied ships to do an action, like attack or patrol. You can also take charge and "jump" into the selected fighter (If it is an F22). The pilots who you give orders to are however not brain-dead. When you command one single fighter to attack a fully loaded carrier for example, he will disobey your order. All the previous make F22 ADF in the field of gameplay and graphics THE number one in the family of flight sim’s.

Sound & music. Music: Context-sensitive MIDI tunes and CD-music. The midi tune is quite calm at first, but when you are near a bogey or your primary target, the music gets more nervous. These sound particulary good when you have a wavetable soundcard. The CD-music is also very good, but it’s not context-sensitive: It’s always the same. Sound: (Fill in: I’m tired using all these adjectives) The sound when you fire a missile is very lively: If you didn’t know beter you’d swear that you just launched a rocket from under your seat! The engine sound is also very realistic. Special feature: When you use the external view, you can view the plane from all sides and angles, using your numeric keypad. The engine sound is here "position-sensitive": From the rear of the lane it sounds the loudest, and from the nose the weakest.

Addiction. The most addictive flight sim ever. The training missions will keep you busy for a while: They are interesting and the learning curve isn’t too high. And after that, the other missions will never bore you. And if you should get bored of the game, you’ll always like an instant action game, where you must shoot as many bogeys as possible and where you have unlimited fuel and ammo. Not very realistic, but extremely fun.

EP sez:

F22 ADF is definetly the most realistic and best flight sim now available on the market. It has absolutly no flaws and it simply lets the competition miles and miles behind him. Even top-of-the-bill Falcon 4, which is still to come, shouldn’t underestimate this heavenly sweet creature of DID...

(c) 1998 Erwin's Pages
Erwin "Reaper" Husin

Score

Gameplay: 9

Graphics: 9,5

Sound & Music: 9

Addictiviness: 8,5

Overall: 90%

Links

(DID has been taken over by Rage Software)