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Tornado Developer: Digital Integration Ltd. Publisher: Digital Integration Ltd. Year: 1993 The Falcon series of combat flight sims has been the gold standard for realism since 1987, but few fans of the genre picked up Tornado, a similarly complex and rewarding game that flew under the radar in 1993. Tornado served up some of the most memorable missions ever, and the best of them involved absolutely no dogfighting. Instead, the sim challenged you by forcing you to skim over the ground at terrifyingly low altitudes and nerve-wracking speeds as you wove a precarious path through complex air defense systems. The only way to achieve those high speeds was to crank the plane's swing wings all the way back, which made it handle like a prairie schooner.
Suffice it to say this game took the pucker factor to agonizing new levels, and we've only described what things were like before you got to the target. Once there, it took serious skill and resolve to weather the hail of enemy AAA fire, and your reward for all that work was trying to make it home without getting pounced on by enemy fighters. Tornado was the Thief of combat sims: It was always better to use skill and superb planning to bypass threats rather than face them all head-on.
That's not to say Tornado couldn't bare its fangs when things went pear-shaped. The game let you fly both the IDS strike fighter and the ADV interceptor, and the latter was a blast to fly on escort missions when the air needed to be cleared of enemy planes. The avionics modeling wasn't quite up to the lofty standard set by Falcon, but it was still excellent and forgivable due to Tornado's other strengths. For one, it had perhaps the most flexible and intuitive mission planner ever put into a game. Falcon fans screamed for years for a mission planner with similar power and only recently have other flight sims come close to matching it. Tornado also provided an environment brimming with atmosphere, as other planes could be seen going about their business on the battlefield in missions totally unrelated to yours.
Tornado should have been more successful, but it had a lot going against it. The biggest problem was the plane itself, which was a joint UK-German-Italian design few Americans were familiar with. The obvious focus on ground attack also seemed a bit dull for the uninitiated, who would rather take the controls of an agile fighter and shoot down other planes. Digital Integration may grace us with a sequel, but until then we can play the company's similarly underrated F/A-18E Super Hornet.
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