It's back, and is better then ever, so get those HOTAS flight sticks back out of the closet and dust them off!
User Rating: 9 | Falcon 4.0: Allied Force PC
I’m very excited to see Falcon 4 back! I know for years now there were add-ons for the original game, but after a while I couldn’t keep up with all the add-ons, and upgrades. It’s good to see a single package that brought everything pretty much together. For us long time veterans of the original series, first starting up Falcon 4 Allied Forces, you see a very familiar desktop, with everything, for the most part in the right places. Before that, you’re welcome by a very sharp video of a Viper on a mission, taxiing taking off and flying. Not bad at all. As with the original game, there are many options to get right into the game, or setup a campaign so that you can fly a very power dynamic war. The dynamic campaign is still the most powerful I’ve seen in any game. It’s a joy to be part of a large battlefield like that. One thing that really drew me back into Falcon is the new Balkans campaign. I played the hell out of the Korean campaign in F4, so to be able to play a new one, is a huge joy. The Balkans isn’t like anything we saw in the Korean theater; it’s much darker, and cloudier, we many more hills and valleys. Lead Pursuit, the developer, put a lot of extra work into cockpit; you now have a full clickable, or “Aeyes cockpits”. Also, the lighting inside the cockpit is also much more refine, with better dial/gauge lighting, and inferred views. Well done. The graphic as a whole, wasn’t that much different from the original sim, other then a much improved terrain and a very nice looking cloud and fog system. That really helps the realism. The AI seemed to have been upgraded also, the game seem to be a bit harder, with the computer side, really kicking your butt in the campaign, if you’re not careful. WARNING: Learn the game first before starting a campaign. You will enjoy it much more. The manual is just the best I’ve seen in any flight sim, 716 pages, with great pictures, and charts. The only problem is that it’s an online, PDF manual. Nothing but a small booklet to get you going, and like any veteran knows, you need to be able to step away from the computer and read the manual. I really love what Lead Pursuit did with this sim, I hope this time, when they say that this will be a start of a “electronic battlefield”, they mean it. You veteran know what I’m talking about. The campaigns are well done, and are very huge, and I mean huge. The computer AI seems to be redone, and seem to be close to what we expect in a flight sim of the caliber. One more thing I want to say about Falcon 4 AF is that it seems to be very, very stable. I didn’t have a crash to desktop one time, in the 10 hours of so I’ve played the game. That’s very nice indeed, after a hour long mission.
