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Friendly wingmen give you that vital edge. Joe Robinson Birdseed here. As a simulation though, things aren’t half bad.

Winsock 2.2 Download. The F-16C is nicely represented here – flight mechanics, avionics and weapons systems all factor into the game, and the beefy manual goes through everything in good detail. The cockpit controls are all wonderfully represented and the game is high res enough (640×480) that all the instruments are readable at a glance. The Multi-Function Displays can be realistically cycled through several modes, the radar mostly works as it should, your plane’s scan pattern is limited and the included weapons are all finely implemented. The bottom line being this isn’t a throwaway sim.

But looking around your cockpit and situational awareness in general is problematic when engaged in a dogfight. While the game’s excellent padlock view makes tracking bandits easy, the fixed camera angles used to simply look around the cockpit is much less fluid, and the keys used to turn the camera up, down and sideways are awkward at best. Worse yet, you can’t zoom in on your HUD, a real drawback when fine tuning your aircraft for a few Gatling bursts. The inclusion of the LANTIRN (Low-Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infra-Red System for Night) and its inherent complex functions is the real saving grace to this sim, and it makes night missions quite a lot of fun, though challenging as night flying tends to be. You’ll have a broad selection of some twenty weapons, including heat-seeking and radar-homing missiles, guided and unguided bombs, dumbfire rockets, and the option to attach reserve fuel tanks or an ECM pod, a defensive device designed to counter enemy radar.