A remaster of one of the more accessible modern military aviation sim from the late 90s era golden age of military aviation sim, there's almost nothing like this sim in gaming since the late 2000s, I said almost because there's a handful of them and we're going to come back to it later in this review, also I want to tell you that I never played the original sim back in the days so this review can indeed be seen as an actual review not a nostalgia driven commentary.
So now firstly this is a sim, it is not an ace combat type game and from what I can tell it's still like an order of magnitude above war thunder simulation mode in term of complexity, this sim after all still provide you with a 100+ pages of PDF manual just like many sims from that era.
A quirk that I quickly found when playing this sim is that you absolutely need a numpad capable keyboard to play this game because there are important mechanics that absolutely need numpad keys for them to work and the dev have said in a steam thread that they are not going to rework that to fit modern gaming keyboard shenanigans, also the fact that again, just like other sims from that era the keybindings in this sim is close to 100 functions so it would not be easy to replace those numpad keys functionality elsewhere for keyboards that lack then.
That being said, the dev have reworked some parts of the controls by allowing modern flight sim controllers to work with the game with one huge caveat :
Aside from the axises which btw only use 1 axis for engine throttle (despite the fact that this sim is about F22 which has 2 engines)... There's only like 10 buttons/functions that you can assign to your flight controllers and yeah those numpad keys functionality that I talked in the above? That's NOT rebindable to your flight controllers so that's why I needed to point that out.
I do not know if modern gaming gamepad can work with this sim because I couldn't be bothered to check, I own and use a VKB HOTAS, to be precise they're the Gladiator NXT EVO and a STECS mini plus with customized additional buttons. That works and oh another thing just like in the old days you have to manually rebind your flight controllers if you want to use them, there's no modern plug and play from mainstream games and mainstream gaming controllers.
Now let's on to the sim itself, safe to say it leans more in the middle of the scale between arcade and full realism simulation, it's closer to the Jane's Combat Simulations Fighters Anthology titles than the likes of Falcon 4, Jane's F18 etc.
Planes avionics, radar systems, threat warning systems, weapon firing systems, communication systems and navigations systems are all vastly simplified if you compare that to DCS realism mode, but there are still way more systems to learn and operate compared to again war thunder sim mode, and in some systems there are more complexity than in Fighters Anthology series or Strike Fighters series, for example in here you have to manually use LANTIRN targeting pod to lock a laser guided bomb.
Now for the game content itself, there's only training missions and campaign missions which is named "your if duty" in which you fly scripted linear missions, mission by mission, meaning you have to complete a mission to unlock the next missions, there is no dynamic campaign in this game, I heard that's in the sequel of the original sim, which unfortunately at the moment of this writing is an unknown whether or not it will come in the future, I also want to point out that the dev has teased the players with a seemingly new sim that could be the next iteration of the series but there's no confirmation.
Another quirk of this sim from a gameplay perspective, because this sim relies on linear missions and linear progression, the missions themselves can have pretty wild variances of their difficulty, one mission can feel simple and easier while the next simply seem impossible after you failed your first few attempts requiring you to improvise your approach and be different from what the mission structure want you to approach.
Movingnon, this sim retains the original graphics and audio but they've been "upscaled" to work with modern hardware, also after release the dev have made the game to work with 21;9 display so I'm happy with that, because virtually all the golden age sims were made for 4:3 displays... Also of note I heard modern head tracking also works for this game although I never have such peripherals so I can't comment on it.
Earlier I said that there are some contemporary sims similar to this, on steam from what I know they would be Combat Air Patrol 2 and Tiny Combat Arena, somehow both are Harrier plane sim, I never tried CAP 2 due to it having mixed review, but I played TCA, this sim is more complex than TCA and have far more contents (well without mods addon for TCA, but then again this sim is also open for modding)... The only thing TCA has over this is the graphics, the modern low poly aesthetic graphics made with Unity engine still has better overall graphics than a remastered version of a 30 years old game engine...
If you never played modern military aviation sims and want to try it, this sim is practically the best entry point for today, and if you want to choose between TCA or this sim, this sim is the obvious choice.
