Flying Corps
To find out how it felt to fly and fight with the thrilling forerunners to modern fighter planes during the airborne battles fought over France during the First World War you could not do better than Flying Corps. This is not a game for fans of the Arcade style PC flight simulators but if you like a bit more character in your flight sim, this is the business.To get the most out of this game, you really need an extremely powerful Pentium processor, but then just about every game would benefit from that, and at least Flying Corps allows you to change the resolution to make it run better on whatever machine you may have. A major benefit about this game is that it runs under DOS, which is becoming rarer and rarer these days. The landscape generator is fast and very realistic, and makes it highly exhilarating to fly over the country-side of wartorn France.
Flying Corps lets you fly either British or German aircraft, with different handling and weapons adding to the realism. The game comes with a book on Practical Flying and selection of important maps of areas of the Somme and Verdun area. You can fly on a number of different missions, ranging from taking part in a single "scrambleâ•™ mission to immersing yourself in one of four major campaigns.
Although I played using a joystick, I also tried playing the game with the keyboard to see if the handling was any different. Apart from the obvious advantage as far as realism is concerned when playing a flight sim with a joystick, I found that the game was just as enjoyable with the keyboard.
Before playing Flying Corps, I was not a great fan of flight simulators. This game I found extremely addictive and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone.
Check out Rowan Software for more details.
Reviewed by Joel Newman