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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It's Historical; But it doesn't Date!, 7 Oct 2001
By A Customer
As an RAF selection to add on to FS98/2000 or CFS this is a rather strange group of planes. There are none of the following famous planes: Lancaster, Hurricane, Jaguar, Mustang, Stirling, Harrier, Vulcan, Hercules, Tornado, Buccaneer or Phantom! That is because this company released those types mostly on another CD some years ago (even before CFS came out) which they would do well to up-date and re-release, as you can no longer get for love nor money! However, there are some VERY interesting types here, and some not so attention grabbing planes too. Half of the selection are of course WW2 planes, others date back to the 1930's and the rest are post war jets and one helicopter. There are no WW1 types which is a surprise! My favourites are the 2 Beaufighters and the Lysander included. The Beaufighters are wonderfully different, not just in their liveries (one is from Malta and the other a night fighter without the familiar Redial engines, but the less common RR Griffons), the guns are correct too. The other bombers also have guns that fire in roughly the right direction (i.e.the Halifax, Wellington and "Malta" Beaufighter's rear guns shoot behind - still nearly impossible to hit an enemy attacking from astern though!). The bomb doors open on SOME planes and the flaps all do their stuff, with a few cockpits having "pop-up" panels of Throttles and enlarged instruments so that you can actually read them. This because of the minute detail level that the cockpits have, soi that the 2 Spitfire panels look completely different to the CFS standard Spit panels (more realistic I guess?). The outside views are certainly excellent, the Spitfire's are both a massive improvement on the terrible CFS renderings! They are still the Mark 1 and 9 though. That brings me to the other sub-types included. There are 2 Mosquito's, one as you would expect with cannons and bomb capacity, the other is a high altitude reconaissance version in blue, NOT what the people really want for the necessarily low level combats of CFS. The panels are sublty different as in reality they were. There are also 2 Tiger Moths, one being a trainer in bright yellow. This all gives the impression that this collection is a compromise between the CFS and FS 98/2000 users, as the VC10 is certainly unarmed, as are the Hawk trainer(with patriotic Union jack tail!), Nimrod (hardly like the mighty Biblical hunter its named after!) and Chinook helicopter (the only one that made it to the Falklands).All these would appear to go better in the up to date environments of FS, though I have successfully tried a mock in-flight re-fuelling behind the VC10 and a Red Arrows team display in CFS quick combat mode (because ALL of these planes appear in the Quick combat selection automatically, as well as in groups of Pre-WW2, WW2 reconaissance and post-war etc...a very good feature. Finally, there is a combat campign scenario for CFS. This is not at all creative, though, as it is only based around the mk1 Spitfire and the default Hurricane (already in CFS!) so there seems to have been a mass of possibilities missed there (surely the Hawker Typhoon, the RAF's first designated Fighter-Bomber offered more campaign mileage..or really any other combat plane included!), I was also surprised to find the Javelin included. This was not any pilots favourite plane as it was badly under-powered andhad obselete technology to boot. The real pull would be the Euro_Fighter Typhoon, I suppose, as it does all the stuff this brand new type is meant to do EXCEPT fire long range missiles and have a realistic gun-sight in CFS (a fault in the way CFS displays gun-sights which cannot be over-come, unless you only use it in FS2000/98 with a voodoo 1 graphics card which I do not yet have- unless someone wants to trade me one!).
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