Echelon

The Good
The graphics are quite nice, good lighting effects, water effects, and high res textures on the fighters. The weapons effects are nice too, with good explosions. There is a pretty good variety of environments with day and night time missions, and it works very well with my force-feedback joystick.

The Bad
Well for starters there is little to no story. You get in your fighter and do your mission and fly back. Repeat many more times. There's just no substance to the game. The flight model is very simplistic, no stalls or spins. You fighter turns on a dime with little speed loss. Granted its not supposed to be a hardcore flight sim, but this isn't space here people. I also didn't notice much variety in the enemies you fight, and most dog fights turned into turning fests until someone got off a lucky shot.

The Bottom Line
Echelon is a very boring flight sim that takes place sometime in the future on some planet somewhere between some two people or factions. That's about all you get. It was one of Buka's first games I believe, or one of their first games to be published in the US. It's an average start I suppose, but I wouldn't recommend it. Basically it appears to be a demonstration of a nice graphics engine and a poor flight model with some nice pyrotechnics thrown in to boot.