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Combat Flight Sim 3

Combat Flight Simulator 3 is easily one of the most ambitious flight simulators ever produced, but not for any typical flight sim features. Rather, its key feature point is a dynamic campaign that responds to the player’s actions and shapes the outcome of the war. Players choose between the RAF, Luftwaffe and USAAF and fly their first missions starting in early 1943.

Of course, this being a continuous campaign with randomly-generated missions, it suffers from all the traditional drawbacks of random missions. Given that real AI is still a pipe dream, random missions always fall into pre-determined categories set by the designers. Since CFS3’s focus is not on air to air combat but on the tactical ground war, these limited scenarios might actually have turned out in its favor. After all, there were only so many kinds of ground targets that a fighter-bomber or tactical bomber could hit, right? That’s very true, but rarely are the targets in the real world going to be carbon copies of one another.

Target dead ahead

Wildly inaccurate gunfire

Avoid 'em fighters

Even though CFS3 presents the player with multiple choices for missions, and in fact even allows him to choose the zone in which the mission will be flown, it quickly gets repetitive. Part of the problem is that the cream-of-the-crop, 3 star missions are inevitably the same kind. Another problem is that few players will deliberately choose missions they find difficult or frustrating. In fact, the tendency is to pick the easiest, or quickest, or most interesting ones. While this varies by player, inevitably a select few favorites appear and the rest become neglected. It’s all too easy to become trapped in a repetitive cycle of easy missions, because it’s better than doing the ones you don’t enjoy. This is particularly since the AI pilots are useless, you can’t trust them to cover for you and the command interface with them is hopelessly insufficient. The best you can hope is to help a few destroy the target, order the remaining ones to attack targets of opportunity and make it home. Don’t bother trying to give new orders until they’re done their old ones. Sure, you’re being shot to hell. But he has that bridge to destroy.

Wait a minute? 3 star missions?

The campaign management part of the game offers up the same kind of perceived depth that the flying was supposed to. As the player flies and completes missions, he collects prestige. Naturally, more prestige is gained for successful completions, and bonuses can be earned by nailing targets of opportunity. The personal prestige of the player allows him to purchase an upgraded aircraft for himself. Strangely, this purchase only works if the aircraft is available to the squadron.

Junkers down!

Another one bites the dust

Watch the debris

Speaking of which, the squadron has its own prestige level, which appears to be the sum of the total prestige earned by all its pilots. Squadron prestige is what unlocks the big rewards of the game, like getting new aircraft early, or launching ground offensives. But why launch ground offensives if they happen anyway? The new aircraft you get eventually, and their cost in prestige is ridiculous. Still, you’ll end up getting them early just because there’s nothing else to do with it.