With its budget-priced ($19.99) Fighter Pilot, Electronic Arts hoped to create a product that would provide beginning gamers an easy entree into the often intimidating world of modern air combat - sort of a "Jet Combat for Dummies" with such simplistic weapons and flight controls that it could be enjoyed even without a joystick yet still be challenging for more experienced PC pilots. And realizing that the low price point would mean that many of the game's target audience would probably be playing on entry-level systems, EA also aimed to make a game that (and I quote from the press release) "looks great without extra hardware or a souped-up system" and can "be played on a standard PC."
Those are some pretty divergent goals for a single game, and not surprisingly Fighter Pilot manages to achieve very few of them. It's true you shouldn't expect a whole lot out of a game that retails for under $20, and unfortunately Fighter Pilot doesn't prove to be an exception to that rule - even if judged solely as a trigger-finger workout.
Set in the Middle East (surprise, surprise), Fighter Pilot sends you on 24 missions that take you from destroying hidden weapons in Iraq and launching counterterrorist strikes in Iran to a showdown with a couple of terrorists based in Afghanistan who've been behind all the trouble from the very beginning. Before each mission, you're briefed by "General Mervyn," who was your father's commander (surprise, surprise); he'll brief you on pretty much all you need to know, but it's hard to take him seriously because his voice sounds more suited to selling pennies-a-day life insurance to senior citizens rather than outlining antiterrorist air strikes.
Mission types include fighter sweeps, ground attacks, escorting copters inserting special forces teams, and protecting aircraft on rescue missions. You'll be able to pick some type of support aircraft on most outings - an AWACS (increased awareness of enemy installations and planes), an EF-111 (jams enemy radar signals), an F/A-18 or F-22 (to deal with enemy fighters), or an F-4G Wild Weasel (ground attacks) - but it's possible to win all the missions without any assistance at all. When you do choose one, however, the only communications command you need to know is "call for help."
Although there are four very different types of planes featured here - F/A-18 Hornet, F-117 Stealth fighter, F-22 Raptor, and Su-35 Flanker - about the only noticeable differences between them are top speed and weapons loadout. Cockpit displays can be confusing, so they've been chucked altogether in favor of a "cockpit perspective" that offers a panoramic view of the action uncluttered by even a HUD (and that view isn't even available in the software-only mode, where only external angles are available). That's OK, though, because you don't need to worry about stuff like fuel consumption or how various systems are faring. A graphical display and remaining "hit points" show how your aircraft's holding up, and while I'm not sure, I think you could probably fly for as long as you like, with enemy planes emerging regularly (and apparently endlessly) from who knows where.
Assuming you maintain a reasonable altitude, the only way you'll crash one of these babies is either to throttle down to zero and wait for gravity to work its magic, or point the nose toward the ground and auger in on purpose. Even on the expert difficulty setting, evading SAMs and air-to-air missiles requires little more than a few sharp turns and an occasional flare. And to ensure that newbies make every missile count, a flashing "SHOOT" appears whenever a targeted bandit gets so close that a kill is almost certain.
Clearly, this isn't the game for serious flight-sim fans, and any veteran gamer - even those unfamiliar with flight sims - will breeze through it in a few short hours. To be fair, Fighter Pilot does at least introduce the tools of modern air combat and a few tactics in an innocuous way, and there's plenty of stuff to shoot at. But given how little effort was put into normally time-consuming stuff like enemy AI and accurate flight physics, it's only reasonable to expect a little more in the eye-candy department: translucent smoke trails are standard fare by now, and the explosions and terrain graphics are merely adequate. In short, about the only folks who'll be impressed with the visuals in Fighter Pilot are those who've never seen a 3D video card in action.
And what about those gamers without 3D cards - you know, the ones "without extra hardware or a souped-up system" that EA says it's targeting with Fighter Pilot? Well, the truth here is that while Fighter Pilot will run on the sub-$1500 systems it was supposedly designed for, the graphics in the game's software-only mode don't stack up to what we saw in action games from two and even three years ago. As far as another of the game's features is concerned - the ability to play with just a mouse and keyboard - I'll have to admit it can be done, but the same can be said of a half-dozen other action-oriented flying games.
For someone who's never played a computer game (and who has a system with a 3Dfx-based video card), Fighter Pilot might be fun for a little while. But about the only thing that would keep it interesting for very long is the game's multiplayer modes (all the usual connection types are available). And without support for the game on a service such as HEAT or Mplayer, the target audience will probably be as daunted at the prospect of locating opponents and establishing TCP/IP connections as they presumably are at the thought of mastering a complex jet-fighter simulation.
In the end, the only thing Fighter Pilot succeeds in is proving that it's possible to create an action game based loosely on modern-day aircraft and sell it for $19.99. If that's good enough for you, then check the Yellow Pages for the nearest Wal-Mart.
