Description

With your super detailed F/A-18 Super Hornet you will involved in ground attack missions and dangerous navy landing operations.
Disengage your jet from enemy SAM missiles, avoid radars, select your favorite weapons and destroy warships, shoot choppers and try always-new free scenarios from online community with free flight mode.

Those of you heavily into your complex flight simulations will be probably disappointed as this is an arcade look at air combat with a strong emphasis on fun. The game begins by putting you immediately into the middle of a firefight and you never spend time travelling for weeks within a complex mission objective. While this might alienate the flight aficionados amongst us for the average gamer this is a welcome change, because you can get to focus on the interesting things, like fighting !

To be fair, while this isn’t clearly a simulation by any stretch of the imagination, it certainly is more indepth that previous City Interactive games especially when it comes to realism. You can now, for example communicate with your wing men and although its limited to four commands it does add somewhat to the overall experience, especially later when the skies become filled with enemy aircraft.

Combat wings also asks the player to handle the raising and lowering of flaps as well as landing gear. This design change has meant that players now have more control over their craft and surroundings and no longer will the game automatically adjust your speed or trajectory to suit the situation.

The difficulty level is not really that challenging until you set it to hard and the control system to advanced (from arcade) but mainly the difficulty is down to how many enemy aircraft you can destroy, because there are literally hundreds in any given mission.

Additionally, the developer has improved the selection of aircraft to create a little more diversity and there are a plethora of scenarios involving land based targets, defense, offense and ships at sea. This helps to break up the missions with a little variation.

Special mention also needs to be made of the aircraft modelling because this is the first time that City Interactive have released a game with realistic looking aircraft. There is plenty of fine detail on the hulls which really brings the whole experience to life.

The damage model is also extremely appealing, because the planes can start to smoke at first, then they can catch fire and start smouldering. When a critical hit lands, then they can explode with parts of the aircraft spraying in all directions. It is a very rewarding sight after a long and challenging dog fight.