Fighter Wing V2.0 is Merit Software's fighter simulation featuring modem and network capabilities. Fighter Wing allows the player to create pilots from different countries and fly a wide variety of both American and Soviet made fighters. A healthy selection of weapons and scenarios all over the world and straight from today's headlines are also featured.
You begin play by creating a pilot. You decide what nationality your pilot is and before each mission you designate whether you're flying either American or Soviet designed fighters. Depending on which nationality of fighter you choose, you are presented with a set of scenarios. The scenarios are straight from today's political and military headlines. In fact, the scenario setups are often actual world events with a twist to facilitate a fighter mission. So a scenario may begin by discussing the SALT talks and twist the actual history enough that you're flying in World War III by the end of it.
The actual missions are often more than just putting you in the sky and saying "kill em all." Some scenarios give you missions in which shooting down other pilots isn't even a main objective. For example, one mission was to fly around in one sector while taking reconnaissance. Any killing of enemy targets is great for self preservation but the mission could be fully accomplished without any kills. But, there are tons of targets in other scenarios that require kill quotas to keep even the most bloodthirsty content.
Certain missions present you with the option to pick a fighter, either American or Russian made. There's an impressive number of fighters to choose from, including the F-16, the Stealth Fighter, and Russian MiGs. Each plane has it's own pop up screen with performance information and developmental history. There's also a vast number of weapons with which to outfit your plane, including a slew of missiles, recon pods and machine guns. You can load your fighter however you want or you can choose the default load of weapons, which is usually a good mix of weapons for combat. When you fly the different fighters, you can really tell the difference between their performance. Some are faster than others and some maneuver better than most. After flying a few missions and checking out the different performance specs in flight, you'll soon have picked out yourself a favorite fighter.
Fighter Wing had maximum play time in mind when it was designed, so stuff like taking off and landing was left out, being considered an unimportant element in having fun. You start the game in the air and when you accomplish your mission the scenario simply ends and gives you a run down of your mission. Don't expect the most detailed fighter simulation here. The emphasis is much more on flying around and shooting instead of trying to give you the complete fighter jet experience.
One nice feature in Fighter Wing is the amount of video that has been included. Footage from the television series "Fire Power" has been added in certain points of the game. When you begin a mission you see jets taking off from a base and when you fire a missile you see a quick cutaway showing an actual missile being fired. This video has been incorporated quite well, being as unintrusive as possible while playing. However, the game still pauses when these clips pop up so you'll probably turn this feature off most of the time when you play, simply to preserve the continuity of battle.
Fighter Wing was designed primarily for network and modem play so when I saw the graphics I wasn't too surprised. The terrain is ugly and not very realistic looking at all. When I chose high resolution and high detail the game ran very choppy. There are, however, many options to turn on and off so you can tweak it to run best on your system. I pretty much just ran Fighter Wing in the lowest resolution and graphic detail to get it to run smoothly. In medium and high resolution mode you can adjust the size of the screen to get it to run faster. On a Pentium 60, however, I had to get the screen so small to get it to run smoothly that I really couldn't see the action very well.
The external views are nicely done, however. The looks of the actual planes are impressive, with some very nice detail, and Fighter Wing comes with a variety of views to choose from. You can play from the full screen view, the cockpit view, the "To Enemy" view which shows your plane from a point looking towards your enemy, the "From Enemy" view which shows your enemy plane from a point looking towards you, "To Friendly" and "From Friendly" views which do the same as the enemy views except with your wingmen, the rear view, front view, action view which is like a chase plane keeping up with you, and the missile view which puts the camera directly behind the last missile you fired. Along with these basic views you can zoom in and out, tilt the camera up and down and, on non-directional views, rotate the camera to whatever position you want around the object.
Multiplayer mode is really what Fighter Wing does best. Up to 16 players can fly at once in different types of games. You can play a simple dogfight, where the only point is to kill your opponents, or something a little more organized, like a game of capture the flag. Network games will definitely be the most fun where more than just two players can participate. Teams are set up so a more organized type of battle can take place, making teamwork very important.
Fighter Wing is not the greatest fighter sim ever developed, having unattractive graphics and a higher degree of choppiness than I expected. When playing the multi-player mode, however, the true worth of Fighter Wing came through. Above all, this is a multi-player game and should be bought with the purpose of using it on a network or modem. There are far better one-player flight sim games. This has some nice features in it and is simple to learn and play but the slower execution and poor look of the game makes this a big turn-off unless you can really take advantage of the multiplayer options.
