Fly! II Review
It's very disappointing that a simulation with so much potential is marred by so many problems, because Fly II is fundamentally a good game.
A couple of years ago, fans of civilian flight sims had several high-quality products to choose from. The challengers to Microsoft's flagship Flight Simulator series included Looking Glass Studios' excellent Flight Unlimited III, as well as a newcomer from Terminal Reality called--romantically enough--Fly. Unfortunately, Looking Glass Studios is now defunct, leaving Fly as the only real challenger to the throne Microsoft has held for so many years. The original Fly was a very good game that did some things extremely well--particularly cockpits and instrumentation--though it fell short in some other areas. After last year's interim release, Fly 2K, many hoped that these shortcomings would be addressed in the real sequel, the newly available Fly II. And to some extent, they are--but unfortunately, Fly II has a host of other problems that make it impossible to recommend to anyone but the most experienced of flight simulation enthusiasts.
Specifically, the problem with Fly II is that what's available on store shelves is not a complete game. This is immediately evident when you first open the box to find only a small pamphlet detailing how to take off. Considering the complexities of a typical civilian flight simulator and the usual size of its manual, at this point you'd probably assume that the manual is provided in electronic form on the CD-ROM. Actually, it isn't. Because it wasn't done. For the first three weeks of the game's release, a complete manual was not available to purchasers of the game. So while the game bills itself as "perfect for beginners and experts," beginners will be dead in the water with the boxed product. Even the manual that was finally released is a bit light on information--it weighs in at a mere 53 pages and lacks an index, as well as the comprehensive instrument-by-instrument detail found in the documentation for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Another problem in Fly II is the scenery, or rather the lack of it. One of the real pleasures of playing a civilian flight sim is the ability to pilot your aircraft around familiar landmarks, such as the Statue of Liberty or the Transamerica building in San Francisco. The original Fly was somewhat lacking in this regard, and thus far, Fly II has detailed scenery for San Francisco, New York, and Paris--but once again, you can't get it out of the box. Rather, to find these urban high-resolution scenery files, users will have to download them. At 157MB for the New York scenery alone, this essentially precludes users without a broadband connection from accessing part of the sim that should have been included in the retail game.
The scenery itself is superior to that of the original Fly. However, the downside to this is that the game runs sluggishly even on high-end machines, much like the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator. As a result, those without a good video card (with at least 16MB RAM) should stay away from this game. Even with a 32MB GeForce card and a decent processor, the frame rate wasn't sufficient to provide the illusion of smooth flight. The current patch (there are two presently) relieves this problem a little, but not enough, and the game suffers from severe stuttering at times, especially when loading new textures. Because of this, it's best to install the entire game on the hard drive, which requires 1.7GB of space.
- GameSpot Scorefair
Player Reviews
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Critic Scores
- Media & Games Online 6 / 10
- Game Power 3 / 4
- PC Gamer 45 / 100
- Computer Gaming World 2 / 5
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