Combat Flight Simulator 3 Campaigns

By Andrew Herd (28 October 2002)

aking a look at the campaign game in CFS3, you could be forgiven for thinking it was purely and simply an opportunity for showcasing Microsoft's eye candy, but though there is an element of that in the campaigns, they are complex and interesting to fly. Not only are there some challenging situations in there, but the campaign missions seem to vary every time you fly them, which means that if you don't complete one at the first attempt (if you are anywhere near as hamfisted as I am, every one will take you at least three goes), you won't fall victim to the "if this is the coast, then that must be the pair of 109s diving out of the sun" effect. Each time you refly a mission, you will encounter the enemy in different places and even the weather changes. For example, when I flew the early part of the fighter campaign, the weather got steadily worse each time I tried the shipping attack, until I ended up flying it in a snowstorm. The vis was appalling and without the target display I would have had to fly home again, which would, I guess have been realistic - but who wants to spend half their CFS3 time on missions where you can't find anyone to shoot at?

Very early on in the campaign game, I began to appreciate some of the finer points of CFS3 and while from a pilot's view it may not be perfect, from a gamer's view it is fun on wheels, so let's take a closer look at how the campaigns work. We have already discussed the Quick Combat option, so I guess I ought to mention the non-campaign missions in passing, for the sake of completeness. If you choose the Missions tab at bottom left, you will find seventeen stand-alone situations, which show off virtually all the planes, with the exception of the Mosquito. The missions vary from tank busting to an all-jet melee and like their campaign counterparts, they change slightly every time you fly them, which makes the better ones worth flying twice.

Anyway, onto the campaign. When you select this option, the first thing you have to do is a little configuration. This involves selecting your nationality, whether you want to fly fighters or bombers, your name and how old you are - I searched in vain for a way to select 42-year old pilots, but for some reason the drop-down list ends at 36 (-:

Once you have chosen your pilot, the fun starts. I'm not exactly a died in the wool CFS user, but I am reasonably familiar with the game, so I was completely floored when the dialog shown in the screen shot at left here appeared. My first response was to check out the back of my monitor to make sure a copy of Shogun Total War hadn't somehow crept in there, because not only does CFS3 put you in charge of a worryingly large amount of the air war, you have to launch ground offensives as well.

Yeah - really. No, I have not been smoking that stuff again, I mean this. Ground o-f-f-e-n-s-i-v-e-s. Read my lips.

The map shows the opposing air forces and air bases, with a thick red line dividing the two. At this stage in the war (1942) it is in the sea, because the invasion lies in the future. The challenge in CFS3 is that it could go either way and a German player could end up invading Britain if he played his cards right. The little squares on the map are "frontline sectors" and if you click on one of them, a list of available missions appears in the drop-down list at bottom.

Having nothing to lose at this point, I selected a shipping attack and found myself in a Typhoon on the worst morning in creation - serves me right for being so dismissive of the CFS3 weather options in the last piece, I guess. Had it not been a simulator, I would have taken one look at the weather and gone home. But, tough though a reviewer's life can be at times, I knew there couldn't be any wind, so I decided to chance it.

I stand to be corrected on this subject, but my impression is that no-one really loved the Typhoon. From a pilot's point of view, the big plus was that it could absorb a phenomenal amount of punishment, but the downside was that you could expect to take some, because it was heavy, relatively slow and a pig to fly, though nowhere near as scary as the Tempest, which was real hairy chest stuff.

All the CFS3 missions start with the plane on the runway, where you kick off by hitting "E" and watch the animation as the switches flick and the prop begins to swing. At the risk of making myself unpopular in Seattle, this is the point where I really begin to wish you could do a little more than look at all the pretty dials. There is just no way to alter any of the settings except using the keyboard or a joystick control - what is so bad about using a mouse, team?

Whatever. The campaign progress depends on how each mission turns out, so make sure you read the briefing carefully. Sometimes there are multiple targets and you may come across friendly aircraft on the way, so don't shoot first and ask questions afterward! Just about the only advice I have on the campaign missions is that you can't complete them on your own, so learn the wingman commands (not so difficult, considering there are only four to choose from) and when you have used up all your munitions, don't forget that you can select a new target and ask your wingmen to attack it.

The ground offensive stuff is one of the more questionable features of CFS3. Yeah, I can understand why Microsoft put it in there, but this is a flight simulator, not a strategy game, and going from high altitude air combat to controlling entire armies jars a little. The trouble is that you can't fight the campaigns without getting involved with the bog hoppers, which means that you have no alternative but to read about things like "supply reserves" and stuff that no self-respecting pilot would fill his head with. This could have been dealt with much more elegantly, and after even a short experience, my bet is that this feature doesn't make it into CFS4. This whole aspect of the game feels clunky and out of place, like having your grandmother sit in on some hot date.

So while on the one hand, the campaign lets you indulge in the relaxing hobby of trashing ships, on the other, you have to keep thinking about target priorities. To some extent these are set by the missions themselves, but the help files make an issue out of how important it is to to select the most appropriate target - by which I assume that taking out enemy bridges during advances is the right thing to do - just don't quote me if I turn out to be wrong and on no account are you to fly under them, because if someone gets your serial, you will be filling in forms until hell freezes over.

The one time you should definitely choose one mission over any other is when a "production center" is listed. Production centers are serious items in CFS3 and your entire purpose in life is to deny the enemy his and to protect yours. Get it wrong and you can find yourself without an airplane to fly, which is the ultimate simmer's nightmare. Zapping production centers is one way of eating into your enemy's strategic supplies (the barrel icon right of the campaign map) and if those run out, then his strategic reserve will fall; and then he runs out of planes to fly, and you won't have anything to shoot at. I told you you would grow to hate this side of the game.

The goal of a campaign is to move the front line beyond your enemy's victory locations - you can look up what those are yourself - the problem being that air offensives hardly move the front line at all. This means that you can't win unless you protect your own production centers, destroy your enemy's and build up your strategic reserve until you can launch a sustained ground offensive. The whole thing gives me a headache; how am I, a pilot, supposed to be fighting an entire war? Besides, having to repeat all these ground attack missions in the Typhoon is making me go deaf.

If you grow tired of production centers, or life itself, there is always the Tempest. In true IL2 style, you have to work your way through the missions to get to the better planes and until you have served your time grunting in the Typhoon you will not get to kill yourself in the Tempest. As it happens, it wasn't the most dangerous airplane Hawker ever produced, that honor going to the Sea Fury, but it was close enough to demand the wearing of brown trousers. Personally, I think Microsoft cheated with this plane; it has a gorgeous visual model, the cockpit is in line with all the other planes, but it isn't that much harder to fly than the Spitfire and I don't care what the developers say, but that can't be correct. The Tempest was frighteningly powerful and was capable of climbing to 15,000 feet in five minutes, with even the early versions boasting more than 2000 horsepower, swinging a fourteen foot prop. Most variants were armed with 4 x 20 mm Hispano cannon and they could lug a pair of thousand pound bombs up to altitude without breaking into a sweat, so this was a serious airplane.

You can work out how much time I had to test the flight characteristics of the planes, but the acid test of most simulated aircraft is landing them and with my eyes shut (okay, I am sure I could choose a better expression here, but I just can't think of one right now) I would be hard put to distinguish the Tempest from any of the other fighters. They all have a tendency to wallow at approach speed, even when they are well above the stalling speed in landing configuration in CFS3's still air. Reading various pilot's notes and dredging through experiences tells me that this isn't correct, nor logically, should it be.

For some reason the FS/CFS flight/atmospheric model isn't at its best on approach, where the majority of problems are caused in real life by failing to maintain the correct airspeed and by small gusts and windshear. Just this afternoon, my perfect wing-low final to Teesside went all to hell when I hit some very localised and not particularly severe windshear which can often be found about half a mile from the threshold when the wind is in the north-west - I had forgotten all about it and ended up having to crab back on line and kick the nose straight. That was in a Cessna; in a Tempest, I would have firewalled the throttle and gone around.

Flight Simulator doesn't give you a correct impression of the up-down-sideways-maintain-your-airspeed-rub-your-tummy jiggle you have to do on final in anything other than still air; and by definition CFS3 is worse in this respect, because there aren't any winds at all. In reality, a gusty headwind on takeoff can have you airborne in a trice and then quit and dump you back on the runway with a thump if you aren't careful. Mix a big fighter with those conditions in a crowded circuit and you have your hands full. Now it may well be that the development team took a conscious decision to simplify things by leaving this aspect out, but I think it detracts from the experience of what is otherwise an extremely good sim.

Sure, I appreciate that some simmers don't want to have to sweat blood over a game, but believe me, team, it adds to the fun. I saw a post in the forums a while back by someone who had been on a trail flight and had come away with the idea that it was easy to learn to fly a plane. Well, maybe it is for some people, but the rest of us still have our moments flying aircraft with less than 10% of the horsepower of the beasts simulated here and one of the reasons I fly is that I am learning all the time. There is a real sense of achievement in learning how to control an aircraft in a high workload situation and unless CFS3 has ambitions in the arcade category, then CFS4 would benefit from some work in this area.

If the Tempest is slightly disappointing because it doesn't bite hard enough, CFS3 more than compensates by introducing the de Havilland Vampire and the P-80. People have been asking since time began for some CFS jets and Microsoft have responded really well by choosing these two planes. The P-80 was a natural choice, given that a gunnery-based sim would find it difficult to cater for modern jets - which in any case mostly engage at such huge distances you can hardly call it dogfighting - but I would have gone for a Gloster Meteor as its partner.

Until I saw the Vamp, that is. The team have produced the most fantastic simulation of that dumpy little aircraft and it is hard not to be really enthusiastic about it. From the detail of the gear bays right down to the blue glow of the exhaust, the Vampire is an absolute treat and together with the P-80 and the Me 262 it opens the way to some mouth watering possibilities.

The first add-on that surely is going to have to be resurrected in CFS3 format is FlightOne's vastly underestimated Sabre vs. MiG, an excellent package which sank without trace for no reason I can particularly understand. With CFS3's built-in support for jets I hope we can look forward to seeing some of the classics like the Hawker Hunter and the Super Sabre tooled up to go with the sim, because there surely is some fun to be had here.

And that is that, I guess. Sure, there are some British versions of US planes, like the Mitchell, but I will leave Mad Max to deal with them. Right now, I have got my production centers to worry about. So I'll see you around...

What, a verdict? Stars, and all that stuff? Stars are dangerous things, believe me. You give two and a half to an add-on and before you know it, it has grown another one after editorial intervention. You know me, I don't believe in stars. I never got any as a school kid and I don't see why I should give them away to anyone else. But CFS3, warts and all, is magic. I just hope it runs OK on your machine, and if it does, that your partner is understanding, because he or she will not be seeing you for some time.

Good hunting.

Combat Flight Simulator 3 Preview Part 1