Falcon 4.0

The Good
This is an intimidating, hardcore flight simulator; the fact that this is only the second review in seven years testifies to its esoteric appeal. It came out at the tail-end of a wave of simulators based around the brand-new F-22, and marked the beginning of a slump in new PC flight simulators, in part because the PC market was transitioning away from the kind of complex, adult games of yore - flight simulators and role-playing games being the PC's traditional strengths, certainly back in the 1980s - towards simpler genres, notably first person shooters. Nothing wrong with that, because everything changes, but Falcon 4.0 seems slightly old-fashioned nowadays, with its thick manual and detailed model of a radar system. This is forgivable, in that Falcon 4.0 is the distant sequel of a classic old Atari ST/Amiga game which, in its turn, was also benchmark for realism.

Its strengths are twofold, threefold. Firstly, the simulation of an F16 - in particular its avionics equipment - seems extremely accurate, and at the very convincingly complicated. Secondly, it uses a 'dynamic campaign', in that you fly over a real-time battlefield, as in DiD's earlier 'EF2000'. Rather than playing a series of unconnected missions, you take off, bomb targets, perform a combat air patrol, return to base... and the military campaign (North Korea invades South Korea) continues in the background. If you bomb a bridge, it stays bombed until it is repaired. This alone extends the game's playability, as you have a real sense of being in the thick of a war; many times, I found myself returning to my base at Pusan, to find a wave of enemy bombers carrying out their own mission against it. Armed only with a few cannon shells, I engaged them in a last-ditch defence, to the extend of trying to distract them off-course by flying in their path, and it worked! Generally.

Thirdly, the game has managed to sustain a small and passionate informal development community since its full-time producers went belly-up. There are many patches to (a) improve the graphics, (b) make the game even more realistic, (c) fix bugs, and there were a lot of bugs.

The Bad
It's hard to criticism the game for being accurate to the point of unplayability, because you can turn a lot of the OTT switches and procedures off; Falcon 4.0 is after all a game, an entertainment. As with many of DiD's flight simulators, the manual is thick and filled with information which seems interesting, but doesn't really help you play the game; the nitty-gritty of performing combat air patrols and so forth has to be experimented with before you realise that you can completely ignore the stated mission, and just go off and drop napalm on North Korean targets. Indeed, you often have to do this to have any chance of winning the war. As in real life, it's sometimes impossible to dodge incoming missiles and so forth, not because of a bug, but just because that's how it is in real life; the fact that you play a 'wandering spirit' rather than a single pilot excuses this to an extent, but it's still aggravating. Without patching, Korea looks very smoggy, which may be correct but is a bit depressing to look at.

The Bottom Line
Falcon 4.0 didn't really fulfil its commercial potential; although I am not clear on the details, it seems that the companies which produced it folded, and the game was passed around and eventually further work was stopped, a similar fate to that which befell the sequel to Microprose' 'M1 Tank Platoon 2'. Microprose have a long history of this kind of game, going back to 'Mig Alley' and 'Gunship' on the Apple II, and it's a shame they are no more (in the simulation field, only Britain's Digital Integration and Psion have survived longer, and they are both in semi-hibernation). Falcon 4.0 requires a substantial initial time investment, but it hasn't really dated all that much - the engine was scalable, and it came out in the Windows 95 / 3d graphics card era - and with some of the patches it's a perfectly serviceable modern flight sim, with a complex radar system. Whether it works with XP, I have no idea.