Games: Flank speed
Let's face it, none of us are going to make it as fighter pilots. Movers, yes. Shakers, yes. Tom Cruise, stick it up your tailpipe.
So Su-27 Flanker 2 is the closest I'm going to get to the skies outside of Easyjet. Good thing it's a damn good blast. Right from the intro it is clear that this is a slick project. The menus are clean and easy to read and once the program has started up, the load times are refreshingly snappy when you get flying. Eschewing the usual terrorist-laden sub-Clancy scenarios, combat is based around a future conflict in the Crimea. The game allows you to fly both the eponymous Sukhoi Su-27 (codenamed Flanker by Nato analysts who clearly have nothing better to do with their time) and its carrier-based counterpart, the Su-33.
So how does it fly? From the outset it is clear that this sim reeks realism down to the cyrillic cockpit instrumentation. The flight model feels fluid and handles well, allowing you to perform moves such as the famous 'Pugachev's Cobra' tailslide maneouvre (utterly useless in a dogfight but funky nonetheless). The avionics have more radar modes than Heathrow air traffic control and you have a bigger arsenal than James Bond.
However after getting lost in a wonderfully realistic fog bank for the third time in succession you start to wonder if this can be a little to much. The average Russian fighter pilot has several years and a couple of million roubles of training behind them. The average student has several years drinking time and a couple of million fags. To achieve any degree of aeronautical competence you have to wade through a huge stack of tutorials and an even huger manual. Frankly, unless you are Biggles in disguise this is not an option for an average Oxford student (historians excepted).
The other problem, lurking on the horizon with Sidewinders primed is the current king of the hill, Microprose's Falcon 4.0, Flanker certainly matches it blow-for-blow on the realism stakes but stilted mission structure pales in comparison to Falcon's dynamic campaign, which actually fights a real-time land war while you fly.
Graphically, too, Flanker is no slouch. The rolling landscape looks suitably realistic and the attention to detail is superb. As you zoom over towns and villages you see streets laid out with individual 3D trees. Smokes curls up from chimneys and roads and rivers cut across the landscape. Enemy units, too, are carefully animated with moving guns and turrets. The sheer intricacy puts it into a class of its own.
Your own cockpit comes equipped with the usual bells and whistles. Reflections on the canopy, working dials and a bizarre pair of rear-view mirrors (for those tricky reverse parking maneouvres I guess). If there's one complaint which could be made it is that there are too many dials. As the manual frankly admits, Russian avionics are not up to the latest standards of western computerisation, and scrambling for the right dial with a SAM closing in is not fun.
Flanker, it is clear, is a heavyweight flight sim, and this is not to everyone's taste. Belief the eye-candy beats a solid engine but one which takes a great deal of time to get to grips with. Despite this, though the flight experience is remarkbly well-balanced combining the rush of state of the art graphics with a satisfying blend of mud-pounding and dogfighting. Yes even you can deke it out with Russia's finest. Tom Cruise stick that up your tailpipe.
jt
4th Nov 1999