European Air War

I'm finally the proud owner of eaw on steam wooooo!

Just good retro fun

Well worth the $2.99 I paid for the game while it was on sale, but after playing Microsoft Combat Simulator-2 for many years, but I would have been a little disappointed if I had paid more for European Air War (EAW). The flight graphics are good, especially the friendly and enemy aircraft. It’s clear that the programmers took care to get them right. Even the finest detail of each aircraft is clearly outlined. Ground details are also pretty good when you get close. On the other hand, the cockpit and control panel are otherwise a little fuzzy and the gauges are almost unreadable. The game flows nicely and there is no lag at all. If you are looking for a jump on board, go fly and shoot-em up combat flight sim, then this game could be for you. Unlike MCS-2 there is very little training required to play, especially if you chose to go with the simple ‘Rookie’ set-up. My biggest complaints are with the Joystick set-up. It doesn’t allow the use of many of the controls on your joystick such as the Yaw controls, top-hat for viewing and all the other programmable optional buttons on the stick. You have to choose from a pretty basic selection of control options (joystick, mouse and keyboard), most of which only allow only the basic features of your joystick such as ailerons, altitude and gun trigger. The game was clearly designed to played with a mouse and keyboard. For example, the top-hat will look around, but then you have to use the keyboard to go back to front pilot view. MCS-2 is thirty years old and it still allows for a better custom set-up, and the switches on the control panel actually work if you have a touch-screen. Just reach out and press the button on the panel like a real aircraft. Surprisingly, the graphics on EAW were not that much better than MCS-2 which is a lot more challenging. Lucky, I managed to get MCS-2 running on my new PC with Windows 11 so I can continue to play both.