Superhornet Review - By William "BBall" Ball Page 1 of 3
Here's the deal. You have
just walked into a local theatre, sat down, and are ready to enjoy a
favorite movie. I prefer to use "Saving Private Ryan", in this analogy.
The first few scenes are riveting. The soldiers of the American 29th
Division, have crawled through the blood, guts, and gore, and FINALLY
established themselves at Omaha Beach. They eventually make it up the
causeways, through the bunker system, and prepare to move inland. That's
it, movie over, lights come up, time to go. Huh? Feel like you haven't
seen the entire film…you haven't. Feel like you want more? Well, only
because you do. After flying DI's new flight simulation F/A-18E, you
may be having some of the same emotions.
No matter what you may think of their multi-release "strategy", Titus
and/or DI have decided to release this sim in three stages. The first
stage will be the subject of this review. The following stages will include
things that may, in fact, be considered "show stoppers" for some. These
include a dynamic campaign environment, and a mission editor/builder.
If you can keep that in mind while flying this jet, you may just have
a different feel for it. I guess the more I ponder this idea, the more
I would rather have several releases that arrive bug-free, than a product
that is "all there", but so bug filled it's almost un-playable. It's
an interesting concept, and only time will tell if it's going to be good
or bad for the hardcore flight simmers.
Upon opening the box, I was certainly a bit shocked to see their version
of a "key card". It's a 14" by 5" piece of paper that looks like a key
card's little brother. If your corneas are less than perfect, you're
gonna have fun trying to read this baby. I do not fault the programmers,
etc. for things like this. There's absolutely no question, that a non-flight
sim enthusiast "bean counter" looked at this thing, and said, "Yeah,
looks good. Besides, we save .005 shillings per million copies….let's
go with it." So they went the cheap route with the key card, nothing
a trip to Kinko's wouldn't solve. There is, however one other problem
for us here on the "left side of the pond".
The manual has the word "ENGLISH" in the lower left hand corner. It should
have read "BRITISH". Not so much for the actual manual itself, but the
infamous key card will have you pulling your hair out if you don't catch
on quickly that U.S. keyboards, and U.K. keyboards are different (do
they type on the wrong side of the road too?) A few examples from the
backside of the keycard: Quit=Ctrl/Paste (what?), Auto Catapult Setup=Ctrl/Control
(this one had me speaking in tongues). Fortunately, anything you need
to know can either be found in the manual with the keystroke that works
universally, or you can strap on the magnifying goggles and decipher
the keyboard presentation for most of the peculiar ones.
The manual itself is not bad. Not great, but not bad. Starts with a nifty
cover picture of a Super Hornet flying through more fire than Red Adair
ever saw, with the "required" aviator's helmet reflecting it all. Open
it up and you are treated with a nice introduction to not only the manual,
but the Super Hornet itself. It's a bit dis-jointed at times. For example
the Navigation mode explanations are thrown in with the Radar System.
Later, in the Air to Air section, you find yourself paging back to the
explanations for the Radar you read two chapters before. Now that's really
no big deal. The first Boeing 727 manual I had to use as a new hire,
would've made War and Peace written in Mandarin Chinese seem easy to
read. Manuals are almost always written by non-pilots, so they seldom
seem to be written the way our "logical" brains operate. All the information
you'll need to learn the F/A-18E is in here, plus a good chapter simply
covering Carrier Operations. I've seen better manuals, but man have I
seen MUCH WORSE. This one certainly gets the job done.
Let's jump into the jet. Well, not so fast. After installing, one must
enter a Configuration Editor and select or confirm the appropriate options.
They include: General, Avionics, Virtual Cockpit, Visual Detail, Display,
Model Detail, Sound, and Controllers. You can access all but the Sound
and Controllers options from the PREFERENCES screen in the game interface.
Once this is done, enter the game and get set for the intro movie. It's
7 minutes and 41 seconds of "in your face, Top Gun is king, don't mess
with the U.S.A. bravado", and it is kind of fun to watch. My son and
I sat through it several times, just uttering…."cool".
Finally at the first GUI screen and we are presented with five choices
: Quickstart, Training, Combat, Pilot's Log and Preferences. Let's look
at each one a little closer.
Quickstart is just as it intones. You're airborne in (you choose) either
an Air to Air, or Air to Ground environment. Hostile forces are all around
and it's you against the world. You have a variety of weapons for the
type of engagement loaded, and you can decide to fight in either the
Barents Sea or Indian Ocean warzones. You have an option called Quick
Setup, where you can pick the Time of Day and/or Weather. The sky choices
are: Clear, Patchy Cloud, Cloudy, Overcast, Rain, Snow, Heavy Rain, Blizzard
and Storm. It's anything, anywhere……you want a blizzard in the Indian
Ocean, you got it.
Training offers Air to Air Weapons Practice (5 missions), Air to Ground
Weapons Practice (12 missions), Special Equipment Practice (1 mission
using the Reconnaissance Pod), and a section entitled Aircraft Handling
(10 missions). It's in Aircraft Handling that you'll practice your take-offs
and landings (both day and night, and both at the Lemoore Airfield and
the aboard the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan). You will learn to get from point
A to point B in the Navigation Exercise, conduct a Night Flying flight,
a Formation Flight, and finish it off with a Foul Weather Carrier Landing
lesson. Training is not voiced over, ala Jane's Longbow etc., but it
is sufficient to get you up to speed flying and fighting the F/A-18E
Super Hornet.
In the Combat section you can fly online in a "Deathmatch" game (I quote
the manual here: "Currently, only Deathmatch can be selected." Does this
mean later, we may see co-op?). Up to 24 players are advertised to play
via IPX, Serial, TCP/IP or Modem connections. Or you may choose the "stand
alone" combat missions in one of six different categories in, again,
either the Barents Sea or Indian Ocean locals. The categories and number
of missions for each are as follows: Air to Air=5, Air to Ground=5, Anti-ship=2,
Reconnassiance=1, Strategic Attack=5, and Air Defense=2. Again, remember
that each of these categories is available in two warzones, so you actually
have 40 missions to choose from. One interesting note, under each category
a "Random" button can be pressed after choosing the mission, and various
random elements will be introduced into that mission. The objectives
stay the same, but the strength or weakness of the enemy may change or
"other surprises may leap out at you when you're least expecting them".
In Pilot's Log we get to start and view the career of our "alter-egos".
The first pilot is named "Captain de Fault", and can be neither deleted
nor killed. It's at the second line for pilots where you become someone.
Create your "Roger Ramjet", give him a callsign, and track his status,
flight time, mission counts, kill counts, promotions and (if you're good
enough) medals. The medals available are the Air Medal, the Distinguished
Flying Cross and the Navy Cross. No, I don't have any medals yet; too
much time writing, not enough flying.
And last but not least, the Preferences section. We talked about it earlier,
suffice to say, one can choose from lots of different settings. For example,
you can even select what will be shown when the "Virtual Cockpit" is
displayed, in terms of HUD, DDI (Digital Display Indicators), etc.
O.K. enough of the tangibles, what about the intangibles? The flight
model, the graphics, the sounds, the gameplay, the wingman AI, the padlock
system, the available weapons, the carrier operations. Let's start with
the graphics. If you've read any of the forums concerning Super Hornet,
you've seen that the graphics have taken a beating….specifically the
terrain graphics. Do I think they are a "sim killer"? Nope. Are they
great to look at? Nope. Do they detract from the immersion of the game?
Nope. If you've ever flown any of the other DI flight simulations, i.e.,
Hind, Apache, etc., then you've seen their version of terrain. It ain't
the prettiest, but hell, have you ever seen west Texas? It ain't pretty
either. I'm as big a graphics fan as the next (this is after all, a VISUAL
medium), and I really like the way in which the Super Hornet is graphically
produced (now that's pretty), but I don't think that ugly terrain kills
a sim. I think one gets a good feeling of speed down low, and as for
height acuity, yes it could be better, but with use of the Radar Altimeter
and what peripheral vision we get on a flat monitor, I have no problems
keeping the terrain off the nose dome.
Flight model? Seems fine to me. The last time I looked in any of my five
logbooks, I couldn't for the life of me find any flight time in an F/A-18E.
I have a real problem with people that do not have flight time in THAT
PARTICULAR aircraft, tearing it's flight model to shreds. Granted some
are WAY obvious, but to rant and rave that this one "doesn't really stall/spin
like this", or "it's roll rate is actually 1.5 times the rate portrayed
here", etc. is utter nonsense. In my case, I'll be the first to admit
I don't know what the flight model of the actual F/A-18E feels like,
but I do know how airplanes (and jets in particular) feel, so I would
guess they did a fine job here.
The sounds are nice with one glaring exception. Whomever you choose as
your pilot "alter-ego", must've been that kid on the playground in elementary
school that you just didn't make eye contact with. You know the one I'm
talking about. You say "hi", and he never shuts up! Well, this guy (you)
doesn't mind running his mouth during any and all tight engagements.
His best lines are keepers: "He missed me! He missed me!", "I'm no-joy
up here!", "I'm waiting on tone!", "Let's let 'em know we're here"…you
get the message. He can be ignored, but it takes some practice. I find
the other sounds in the sim to be quite good. The LSO always seems a
tad pissed off (probably pretty accurate, would you want to be out in
the rain at the end of the boat, talkin some "nuggett" aboard, when you
could be in a warm stateroom watching reruns of the Charlie's Angels?),
you're wingman will say something other than "Roger", and AWACS seems
accurate with all their info. The engine and other environmental sounds
are good too.
