Birds of Prey

The Good
The chance to fly 40 different aircraft, including some uncommon-for-flight sim ones (like the X-15, F-5, Mirage F1). The range of missions - recon in an SR-71, tactical bombing in a MiG-21, long-range intercepts in a MiG-25 or F-14. In-flight refuelling. Shoot down enough of your side's aircraft, and you'd defect to the other side.

The Bad
The graphics were a bit poor, the cockpit was dreadful, and forget about the sound. The vast range of aircraft and weapons meant that the couldn't all be modelled accurately.

The Bottom Line
A good game for flight sim newbies, but it just doesn't have the grunt to be a decent flight sim, even back in '91.

The Good
As a fan of flight simulation games, this game offered the right level of detail for me. It came with a thorough, detailed manual that explained every aspect of the game as well as a lot of more general aviation detail and general specs of all the aircraft present in the game. It offered both Easy and Realistic flight models, and while the easy mode offered a very arcade-like experience, the realistic mode suddenly made things like loadout and aircraft choice critical, as they drastically affected your ability to complete your mission. For example, in realistic mode, taking off in a heavily loaded plane without afterburners was very difficult, even if it was below it's maximum takeoff weight. Careful and coordinated use of brakes, flaps, throttle and stick were needed to pull this off, and you needed to be sure you had enough flight time to burn off some fuel or any sort of combat manoeuvres would be tricky.

It supported both digital and analogue joysticks, with analogue sticks being a relative rarity on the Amiga. Still, this made the game as the subtlety of control an analogue stick offered couldn't be beaten.

Graphics were fine, there were some flight sims of the era that looked better, but similarly, some that looked worse. Besides, with most of your flying done at the speeds that military jets use, most of the time you're concentrating on a tiny dot on the horizon anyway. the exterior views were nicely executed, especially those with a fixed horizon, because in these cases, the game harnessed the Amiga's copper chip to produce a graduated sky lighting effect, particularly impressive at dawn and disk. The detail level can be turned down in the game to help it run on less powerful machines, as the framerate suffered badly if you were on the minimum specification. Naturally, with some acceleration, it was silky smooth at the top detail level.

Sound was also well executed, with nice engine sounds, and a nice fading in/fading out effect with wind noise replacing the sound of an engine that had failed or been shut down. It was sound that really showed the difference between playing on an old 14" TV and connecting the Amiga's output up to a beefy stereo - the afterburner rumble was great!

The Bad
The cockpit instrument panel was identical for every model of plane. This was fine for technical flying because all your instrument readouts (and there were a lot of them) were in the same place no matter what you flew, but it sort of broke the immersion of the game a little. Still, with around 40 different in-game aircraft it's sort of unreasonable to expect that many different cockpits and still fit on one floppy disk. Also, like many 3D games on the Amiga, you should really aim a bit higher than the minimum specs on the box. The framerate suffers badly on the 7MHz 68000 of an A500, though it's perfectly playable on an A1200 and flies along (sorry) on an 030 CPU or higher.

The Bottom Line
It's a great middle of the road flight simulator, with plenty of technical details to get your teeth into, so many aircraft and loadout options that you could be kept busy for dozens, if not hundreds of hours as I was. It has the arcade-style flight model if that's what you want too, but really you should put it in realistic mode and get to know the different dynamics of a couple of aircraft. Throw some extra CPU grunt at it (think 68030 or higher) and an analogue joystick, and it really becomes a great game.

The Good
Graphics were very detailed, each plane handled closely to what you would expect (e.g. less weight = more maneuverability) and the VTOL emulation of the Yak-38 and Harrier was great fun to get used to! Payloads differed for each plane and each mission, and the level of realism increased as your choice of plane/weapons combo had to be chosen more carefully the further you get into the game. The enemy is also very clued in and will 'team up' on you to get their target. The manual section about the different aircraft and weapons systems was also interesting reading.

The Bad
Frame rates slowed down noticeably when the ground detail was high e.g. around building and mountains. A progress meter of some sort would also have helped (20 missions in I still didn't know how far I was to impending victory...)

The Bottom Line
Not for the faint hearted. This is a warts-and-all flight sim which takes a lot of time to get used to, and an ever-changing war scenario will even have the strategists out there drooling there next mission. Well worth the time if you want realistic combat and simulation rolled into one package.