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(More customer reviews)Combat flight simulations for personal computers have been around for more than 25 years and have evolved in a multitude of ways. Some flight sims became arcade games in order to appeal to large segments of gamers (i.e. Ace Combat for Playstation 1 and 2). Others remained hard core to their roots (i.e. Falcon series) requiring players to read a 500+ page manual in order to master both flying and combat. Somewhere along this multi pronged pathway, on-line gaming developed from simple head to head modem encounters to small scale on-line battles... J.W. "Wild Bill" Stealey, who founded MicroProse with Sid Meier in the early 1980s, had a vision of massive aerial battles taking place over the Internet. Nothing like that has been done to date and Mr. Stealey, a retired USAF pilot, decided to form a new video game company with that vision in mind. iEntertainment Network was born in 1995 and its focus became creating large on-line air wars. Over the past 11 years, Mr. Stealey's game development team unleashed numerous blockbuster titles under the TotalSims banner covering both World War I and II. One of the top titles in the series is WarBirds 2006, which after more than 10 years of continuous expansion is a great success story in materializing Mr. Stealey's vision of large-scale on-line aerial combat.
A few days ago I had the honor of joining Mr. Stealey a.k.a. Wild Bill for a test flight of his latest combat flight sim: Flyboys Squadron. This game was developed specifically for the MGM Motion Picture, FlyBoys and as such will be available with the film's DVD albeit in the demo form. Flyboys Squadron is a World War I flight sim that covers a range of aircraft that were dominant between 1914 and 1918 on both sides of the conflict. These fragile machines have been recreated with painstaking detail in the game. At the same time Wild Bill's programmers made sure that the flight model is as realistic to the old birds as possible. Flyboys Squadron was built on the solid graphics engine behind WarBirds 2006 and as such offers performance balanced visuals and superb network code, which result in smooth and fun battles. Aside from the multiplayer aspect, the game offers an in-depth single player campaign. The Single Player missions tend to be a very good training course for the true challenge: going mano a mano against human opponents across the globe. FlyBoys Squadron starts with basic gunnery, teaches the player how to solo and survive in combat, and then sends the player out to take on the Baron or to defend Paris from the enemy Zeppelin bombing attacks! FlyBoys Squadron players also get three Easter eggs located on the main screen of FlyBoys, which allow players to choose aircraft from 1915 to 2006, from Sopwith Camels to the modern Predator UAV, geographical terrains from Flanders to Randolph Air Force Base, Texas to make their own missions and single player games. If the player can survive the 12 exciting and multilevel (from novice to ace) difficulty missions, then he should go online against real players!
Flyboys Squadron is part of the TotalSims on-line subscription service which for a bargain price of $13.95 per month offers three Total Sims games. The first month is free and players should take advantage challenging human players to see how good they are. Another good move after joining the TotalSims on-line subscription service is to find an Online Squadron to be a part of when you are on-line. It is a good way to stay alive as I found flying with the =4th= Fighter Group on-line! TotalSims membership offers two more battle tested combat games including the previously mentioned WarBirds 2006, which is a World War II flight sim, and Armored Assault, which is a World War II tank sim. Another great feature of the TotalSims series is that it is continuously updated. By the time most new FlyBoys Squadron pilots get their games, the game will have at least 2 new airplanes, a new terrain, and other new features from the online update feature. FlyBoys Squadron gamers will get additional missions when they update over the next few months!
What started as a one-hour test flight with Wild Bill quickly turned into a five-hour fun blast. The first thing that I noticed is that all three games share more than the same graphics engine. There is a seamless intuitive design present in all three games, which helps a novice player gain experience quickly. For example, in Flyboys Squadron the training missions are structured so that you get to fly with the AI instructor and learn along the way rather quickly. The difficulty setting in the single player campaign can be set to either normal or difficult mode while a truly innovative setting is called: progressive difficulty. This feature starts the player with fewer challenges early on in the game and increases them as the player progresses. The crown jewel of the gaming experience is the on-line mode.
Wild Bill, his friend Bombr- (a retired Air Force Colonel and real pilot), and I flew couple of sorties over the battlefields over Verdun lurking for the unsuspecting German aeroplanes. Within a few minutes of patrolling the skies, we ran into a German fighter (on-line friend BlueMax) who in the spirit of Manfred von Richthofen taught us a quick lesson in not using teamwork. As we were all shot down one by one in an engulfing inferno of fire and smoke we agreed to collectively avenge our digital deaths by working together. The next time we took off and met BlueMax, he was at our mercy and quickly became another casualty of the on-line carnage. I highly recommend using TeamSpeak while playing the TotalSims games including Flyboys Squadron.
As we finished a very in depth tour of Flyboys Squadron, Wild Bill invited me to meet the very friendly, helpful and fun TotalSims community of gamers. It just happened that the day Wild Bill and I flew there was a huge event, taking place on one of the special iEntertainment Network's Total Sims servers. This massive on-line event is the recreation of a Luftwaffe raid on the group of airfields in Southern England. The on-line battle attracted over 170 players on-line from all over the world with regulars coming from Madrid and Brazil. We were divided in groups on both sides following strict rules of gameplay engagement. This event is one of the many highly anticipated recreations of historically accurate aerial battles that are available as part of the monthly subscription. I have flown combat flight sims since 1987 and must admit that I have never experienced the intensity of air war as I have flying along side many of the die hard fans of this game. This is the kind of thing that I expected Battle of Britain 2 and IL-2 to deliver. Those games focused too much on the single player component as their developers forgot that as humans we tend to have more fun playing against each other than against the computer.
The overall gaming experience with FlyBoys Squadron and the TotalSims games is outstanding. The single player game is great fun with lots of missions and player options. The on-line play is lag free and the games run very smooth on the majority of mid to high-end computes. I highly suggest joining the TotalSims on-line community and seeing how much fun massive multiplayer air war can be.
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