Flight Commander 2
Flight Commander 2 is an excellent game as are its sister games Achtung Spitfire and Above the Reich. All are turn base, not action (joystick) games. Each are based on what you could call a hex-based map. If you are a fan of such board/minature games as the J.D. Webster Air Power series (as I am) or any of many old/classic boardgames like Air Force / Dauntless series, you owe it to yourself to get this game. Be aware that for this game the Game Manual is required to play as you are asked a question with referance to specific pages in the manual. If you are like me and have lost the maunual you will be out of luck and frustrated.
5
Contribution by dennis
Excerpt from Games Domain review: "Flight Commander 2 is an excellent tactical level air combat simulation by Big Time Software, distributed by Avalon Hill. Unlike a flight simulator, FC2 uses a turn-based "board game" format, so you control lots of planes at once from an overhead map view. Each "counter" represents one aircraft, ship, ground target, SAM site, or missile. All the aircraft included in the game are jets, but there is a HUGE assortment available, from the early 1950's to the present and beyond, amounting to about 70 different major types. Counting the multiple versions included of many planes (e.g. F-14A, F-14B, and F-14D), there are actually over 110 types to choose from... With so many plane types included in one game, it would be easy to imagine that they'd start to all feel alike after a while. Thankfully, there are many attributes that are set for each plane beyond the usual thrust-to-weight, top speed, and wing loading numbers, and taken as a whole they give each plane a unique character. All the attributes of each aircraft and missile type are documented in the online data library, along with pictures and brief historical writeups. Plenty of interesting reading
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here. So what's it like to play, you ask? At first, it's humbling. The A.I. is quite good. When first I started out, I played the "Top Gun" mission several times at the maximum difficulty setting with all realism options turned on (I don't believe in starting slow!) and got whipped every time no matter which side I took, student or instructor. Eventually I realized I couldn't just move the pieces around and blow stuff up; I had to use real tactics. Some scenarios really hit home the advantages of speed and T/W over maneuverability that novice flight sim fans never seem to grasp. Flying a turning machine doesn't buy you much as you watch helplessly while faster but less maneuverable bandits retreat out of reach then come back at you fast from opposite directions, forcing you to show your tail to one or the other. And going one-on-one, the advantages for the high T/W fighter of using the vertical, doing high yo-yos and such is very plain to see, while in a normal flight sim this is difficult for many people to visualize. While a board game cannot hope to capture the immediacy of performing BFMs in a dogfight as well as a first-person flight sim, for me, Flight Commander 2 provides a fun and enlightening way to experiment with multiple aircraft tactics. Its inclusion of many planes that are simply not popular enough to warrant their own conventional flight sim is just a welcome bonus."
Review and game data © Home of the Underdogs
Rate:
(1 ratings)
(1 ratings)
Genre:
Simulation
Software house:
Avalon Hill
Developer:
Big Time Software
Publisher:
Avalon Hill
Year:
1995
System:
Windows 3.1
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