Rise of Flight : Iron Cross Edition (PC DVD)

I've played lots of flight sims over the years covering many era but WWI has never been one of them. I just couldn't think why it would be fun: slow, boring, ugly. Well, ROF certainly ain't boring and it certainly ain't ugly which is a good thing as the planes certainly are slow! Fly a 109 in IL-2 after a flight in one of ROF's 'birds' (of which 8 are included in this edition) and you'll feel like you're in jet fighter!

There are many excellent and engaging things about this game, so I'll list a few:

Graphics
In a word stunning. From the miles of bombed out no mans land, to the the beautiful trees and rivers, to the way shadows move accross your plane, it is all cutting edge stuff. The plane models are superb also. This game is eye candy gorgeous.

Flight model & Realisem
Flying these aircraft is no easy thing! They are slow, prone to falling into unrecoverable spins, lose bits of their airframes if you dive to fast and often lack any decent useable instrumentation. Fantastic! The sense of really flying a plane is highly tangible.

From your cockpit you can also wave commands to your AI (or real) wingman or fire off flares to give instructions. If you're lucky enough to have TrackIR it's even better. As you lean your head outside the cockpit the volume of on rushing wind rises dramatically - very real. Infact the sound of the wind running over your cockpit is often the best way of telling how fast your flying!

Playability & User Interface
The interface is a bit hit and miss tbh, but once you get used to it there are a load of helpfull options (in terms of stick set up and axis tunning) all of which can be tuned in game (i.e. while you're playing) so it's easy to test your setups. Also, you can create custom profiles for each plane which you can also switch between as you play.

Load times can be a bit a slow, but obviously that depends on your graphics settings and system.

Gameplay
Dogflights are vicerol and rewarding. They are however, hard! This really is like hand to hand combat for airplanes. If you're used to IL-2 Boom and Zoom tactics or turning fights, you'll be amazed how much more compact these things get in the smaller performance envelope of these planes. Some aircraft literally feel like they turn on the spot!

There are lots of solid single player missions (which are fun) and a campaign (which truth be told can be a bit dull - a replacement one is being created by the developers). MP gaming can be found but unless you have friends to play with beware: the guys online are good and getting wacked out the sky over and over again but wear thin. Definitely practise off-line first!

Support
This is the last point needing a mention. The developers are very active and in the few months I have had the game have made several updates to the game, which as far as I can tell where more about adding features than fixing bugs! This game is very stable!

In summary I'd recommend you give it a try if you haven't already, especially if you haven't tried WW1 planes before. The ROF:ICE package has all the planes you'll need but you can buy more if you fancy from the ROF store.

Cannot recommend this game highly enough!!! plays and looks fantastic. I have also downloaded extra content from the site with no problems whatsoever.Very highly recommended

This game gives the feeling that you really have to master the ancient flying crates. Flight model and graphics are superb but the sound and its possibilities could be better. Smart concept of buying the planes you want to use. My only disappointment was meeting a 1918 plane in a 1916 setting in my Fokker E1, I got shot down of course.