Agile Warrior: F-111X

With better realism and plane selection, Air Combat may remain the first choice for flight-sim fans. All pilots, however, will relish kicking in Agile Warrior: F-111X's afterburners to cut a path through the fun, frenzied action.

You're plopped into the oceans of the world, with freedom of motion to go where ever you like. Along the way you establish underwater stations, build corral reefs, and pretty much just explore. Seen from a first person perspective, Aquanaut's Holiday exotic sea life and realistic landscapes soon have you believing you really are exploring the bottom of the ocean. Whether this will be enough to capture the attention of most gamers weaned on fast action remains to be seen. As it stands though, Aquanaut's Holiday is an engaging and very special game.

I had a good time playing Agile Warrior. It's certainly no leap forward, in terms of actually bringing us on board a real military aircraft, but it is never dull in the context of pure stimulation. There are a multitude of weapons options and things to destroy and, as pathetic as it sounds, that can provide for a pretty solid night's entertainment. You have to ask yourself, how many flight combat games have you played where you spent most of your time looking for action instead of actually being involved in it? Agile Warrior's greatest brushstroke is that it never leaves you with enough time to pick it apart as detailed simulation. If you are a war plane aficionado and you like your flight sims to simulate flight, you're just going to laugh at the cartoonish insanity of Agile Warrior. The rest of us, though, are going to have fun dropping CBU-72 FAE FUEL-AIR-BOMBs on a small cluster of stupid foot soldiers who feel macho enough to shoot at our plane.

I stuck with this longer than I needed to, hoping there was more fun to be had, somewhere, but there are too many annoyances, both big and small, to reward me for the effort, It does make me look forward to what Black Ops does next though --- with more 32-bit practice, hopefully they can make a game that's big, fast and fun instead of short, slow and very frustrating.

Virgin Interactive Entertainment, in an attempt to merge the realism of a flight sim with the excitement of an arcade flying shooter, have brought us Agile Warrior F-111X. I am sorry to say… wait! But I'm not sorry to say that this game falls far short of being exciting, immerseful, or any of that other positive game jargon you frequently come across in gaming rags. Put simply, when I was playing this game, my knuckles weren't white because I was clenching my fists with excitement - they were white because I was pulling my hair out in handfuls.

Such is the case with Agile Warrior F111-X. Sure, it's a nice looking game but the lack of depth, originality, horrible controls, and seemingly impossible missions are a big turn-off. Needless to say, if you are a fan of the air combat genre, stay far away from this game and leave it to be forgotten in obscurity.

Und noch ein Kandidat aus der Rubrik "Überflüssige PlayStation-Konvertierungen", der die Frage aufwirft: Wann geht es endlich in die Köpfe der Spieleproduzenten, daß ein Titel, der auf der Sony-Konsole bereits floppte, sicherlich keine Zukunft auf dem knallharten PC-Markt hat? Das beginnt bei der bestenfalls mittelprächtigen Grafik, setzt sich über den unausgewogenen Schwierigkeitsgrad fort und endet im komplett fehlenden Spieldesign.