And there's a bit too much fog effect in the graphics engine sometimes it looks as though you've strayed over downtown Los Angeles on a bad Air Quality Index day. It's a terrific-looking snowy Nevada, but a Nevada nonetheless. The Mekong delta region looks like Nevada with jungle. However, once you've been on the initial Nevada training missions, everything starts looking like Nevada. Mountains and valleys are accurately rendered, with ground textures that don't break up too badly even when you get relatively close (at Mach 1.58 you don't want to get too close a moment's distraction and you're airplane parts).
#F 22 lightning 3 community simulator#
F-22 is easily the best-looking combat flight simulator around. That's a mouthful of technology, but how does it taste? The answer is, pretty darn good. It uses a new, SVGA-capable, polygon-based engine with high-resolution texture mapping and real-time light sourcing. Similarly, the explosions are pretty, but look too much alike after a while.Ĭontrary to reports you may have read, F-22 is a non-Voxelspace title, NovaLogic's first effort without it since WolfPack back in 1989. The music, on the other hand, is repetitive. The "whoosh" of the enemy fighter passing makes you duck involuntarily. But the game's Dolby Surround Sound is extraordinarily effective when you get into a rare head-on close flyby.
That's not exactly up close and personal. You're outnumbered many times in the game, but come out alive because the bad guys have missiles with a 5-mile range, and you have missiles with a 20-mile range. But real dogfights happen all too infrequently in F-22, since the whole point of the F-22 Lightning II aircraft is a stand-off, semi-stealth attack profile using long-range AIM-120 AMRAAM fire-and-forget missiles.
It avoids the cardinal sin of flight sims: when you and the computer opponent end up endlessly chasing each other's tails in a circle. The areas you're flying over are unpopulated, so you don't even get lights on the ground, just blackness with your HUD superimposed.Įnemy artificial intelligence is good, and cannon-only dogfights can be gripping events, after which you have to pry your sweaty palm from the joystick. Night missions are something of a waste, considering F-22's focus on graphics. You can also call up additional screens that focus on Defense, Attack and Stores (weapon inventory), none of which I found particularly useful, since you can get all the information you need from the standard HUD and pop-up radar display. The standard assortment of internal/external, flyby, and target/missile views are available. The latter features realistic retracting landing gear, movable flaps and ailerons, weapon bay doors and air brakes. The cockpit graphics are nothing to write home about - the main eye candy here is on the ground or in the external plane view.
It does have a few minor problems, such as the lack of energy loss in tight banked turns (unfortunately common in modern flight sims), but nothing serious. NovaLogic is justifiably proud of its flight model, and it's definitely better than average. Well, NovaLogic is back with a vengeance, having doubled their staff and more than tripled the size of their U.S. NovaLogic largely disappeared from the market after that, with the exception of some Comanche mission disks, and Armored Fist, the tank simulator that proved that, while VoxelSpace terrain looked terrific from the air, from a tank on the ground it looked like pixels the size of ceiling tiles. Comanche debuted in 1992, leaving gamers agape at NovaLogic's proprietary, patented VoxelSpace terrain generation technology. Air Force's newest "air superiority weapon" - what in simpler times was called a "fighter." It's also the latest flight simulator from NovaLogic, the people who brought us Comanche the revolutionary semi-arcade-style attack helicopter sim. For those who aren't avid readers of Jane's publications, F-22 Lightning II isn't a sequel, it's the name of the U.S.