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Dunc: this is the one taht came out hot on the heels of Falcon and the inevitable comparisons were drawn, with most critics comind down on the side of the Mirrorsoft/Spectrum Holobyte game. At first I agreed with this – but having played Combat Pilot for a while, now I am not so sure.
The game (sorry, simulation) is very much the same as in Falcon and. You are in charge of an F-16, and you have to select missions and armaments and build up flying hours and ‘kills’. It is the implementation that is so different – and, in some respects, rather annoying.

The selection screen is a graphical representation of the Squadron crewroom – and you move a cursor arrow around to choose the options. Clicking on the filing cabinet, for instance, selects the pilots log – where your call-sign, amount of flying hours and number of successful missions are kept. You can call up technical data on this screen (enemy planes, your weapons) as well as go into demo mode. The icon that is going to be clicked on most, however, is the missions icon.

There are six missions in all: air to air, runway destruction, interdictor strike, tank attack, reconnaissance and, finally, Operation Conquest – in which you command an entire squadron of F-16s.
Having chosen a mission, you then progress to the map screen, where you can summon up all kids of crucial information about where you have got to go, what you have got to bomb and how best to get there. From this screen you also have icons which take you to weapons select mode (better than the one in Falcon, with a wider choice of goodies available), and the Met Office, where you can do an accurate check on the weather and suss out the height of the cloud cover – you can even choose a night time scenario, which is incredibly atmospheric. And then it is (hew, about time) ready for take off.

Yaaaarrrgghh!!!
Here is something I HATE about this program. Every single time you start a mission you have to type in a page/paragraph/word code from the manual EVERY SINGLE TIME. Why not just once, at the beginning of the thing?
Anyway, having input the code, you find yourself ready to roll’ on the runway. Press the relevant buttons and – whoosh – it is into the skies.

The ground detail is much smaller and rather less detailed than in Falcon (but there is a lot more of it), and the update speed is a fraction slower i.e. a tad more jerky. Also, somehow, things feel harder to operate – the plane is not so responsive. You cannot spin it onto its back and do an inverted loop so easily – instead you seem to run out of height rather quickly and hit the deck (unless you start from 70,000 feet, that is). It is a guess, as I have no way of knowing short of flying a real F-16, but I reckon this is because Combat Pilot is a far more representation of the real thing: in which case it is not a ‘fault’ at all. Having said this, I will also add that flying in Combat Pilot is not quite as much ‘fun’ as in Falcon. Part of the trouble is the cockpit views. All you get is the standard left/right/forward/back vistas. I could forgive the lack of an external camera, but the lack of ‘look up’ mode is something of a pain.

Overall though, apart from all the little niggles and the disk accessing that goes on between games (yes, there are some fair old pauses), there is something absolutely brilliant about this simulation. Do you know what it is? It is depth. Somehow, the game seems immense, and it stands alone on that point. It is quite hard to get into, and takes a while to grip you totally. But once it has, it does not let go.

OVERALL SCORE 90

Title F16 Combat Pilot
Game Type Flight sim
Publisher Digital Integration
Players 1 (2 with modem or link-up cable)
Compatibility OCS or Patch from Bert Jahn's WHDLoad page
HD Installable With Patch
Submission Tommy Engfors

Review
F16 Combat Pilot is pretty much what it says. A flight simulator simulating
the General Dynamics F16C Fighting Falcon. It is DI's first attempt at
creating a realistic flightsim for the Amiga market.

Beginning with the main menu, the player is offered a multitude of options
-Training, Single mission, Gladiator mode (2 player modemplay) and
Operation Conquest (campaign mode). Each option takes the player to a
submenu with further choices to be made.

Chosing 'Training' lets the player go through a series of missions
designed to teach you how to operate the aircraft and deploy weapons. It
is a good way to start off before hitting "real" trouble. A demo mode is
also offered in which the computer shows how to take off and shoot
air-to-air missiles.

Going for single missions means doing single, randomly generated missions
(pretty logical...). There are 5 categories of single missions and each
has to be succesfully completed at least once to gain access to Operation
Conquest. These 5 categories cover every aspect of military operations
from simple reconnaissance to tactical bombing runs behind enemy lines.

Operation Conquest is basically a large campaign-mode and as such, far
more complex than Single mission. This is where the game really flexes its
muscles.

The player is given a scenario in which some unnamed hostile nation
declares war on the allies (also unnamed). Armed with the resources of an
F16C squadron the player must aid the Allied ground troops in defeating
the enemy. The campaign takes place on a fairly large strategic map where
missions for computer F16s are assigned by the player. In addition the
player creates and flies his own missions as well. The enemy has a large
array of anti aircraft defences, well equipped air force and highly
motivated ground troops. As the war progresses and the enemy forces
advance the front line, new situations arise and the player might have to
reconsider decisions made earlier. For instance assigning aircraft to
close battlefield support instead of radar supression. Having a limited
number of aircraft and weapons requires resource management. It is vital
to make the right decisions and strike a good balance between offensive
and defensive efforts. Is it best to go for enemy communications first?
What about air superiority? The campaign design makes those questions
valid and it is one of the strongest features the game has to offer. It
makes it stand out as something more than just another detailed
flight simulator.

What is lacking a bit, both in single player and campaign mode, are
'dogfights'. In real life the F16 is known as one of the most manouverable
jets in the world thanks to its unstable flight characteristics (most
traditional fixed wing aircraft are built to be "stable" with less
agility, for a variety of reasons). In the game little of that is captured
as the weapons are very effective at taking out enemy fighters beyond
visual range. You detect a hostile aircraft on your passive radar, you
point your nose at it, wait for lock on, fire and few seconds later the
threat is gone. Range was 10 miles. You did not see him and he did not see
you. There simply is no need to get close. The internal 20mm Vulcan gun is
therefore never used in a typical F16 Combat Pilot mission. Not even when
the objective is to intercept and shoot down enemy fighters. It is true,
in all honesty, that the F16C (the version the game simulates) is more of
a multirole fighter with good long/medium range missiles (the AMRAAM for
instance), but it would be fun to have some close visual fights anyway.

The graphics are more or less on the same level as most other
flight simulators for the Amiga. The speed is good an Amiga 500 with
around 10-15 frames per second in most cases. All graphics are filled
vectors with the exception of explosions, which are bittmapped. The game
has no fancy "outside" camera views, but the cockpit is well designed and
looks similar to the real thing (I have compared with photos). When the
sky is not blue it is grey with a cloudbase and in both cases does not
offer anything new. A bit unusual however, is the night mission feature.
At night the world is pitch dark with absolutley zero visibility through
anything other than the low-light Head Up Display. It forces the player to
fly by instrument and thus adds an extra challenge when trying to locate
mission objectives.

Sound is sadly pretty much non-existent except for the standard engine
"whoosh" noise, which changes to a 'nice' whining sound when the throttle
set to idle. The only other sounds are various warning alarms when the
aircraft is being targeted and shot at.

The multiplayer mode works reliably without any obvious bugs. Both players
start heading towards each other in either visual range or beyond visual
range. There is no co-operative mode, only dogfight. Sounds like fun? It's
not. You can take out the other guy with missiles quite easily. The one
who shoots first also wins and since both are usually flying head-on,
waiting to come within range, the battle always ends the same way...
going for a gun kill is not much fun either because it is very, very
difficult to line up for a good shot. Realistic maybe, but not fun.

Success and failure is continously recorderd in a logfile which keeps
track of nice details such as flight time, targets destroyed, aircraft
lost etc. Less nice is the fact that it gets swiftly erased should the
player crash/get shoot down. Even though a backup can be made manually (by
copying the save-disk) it is annoying.

The game itself comes on only one disk which is great for non harddrive
users. Unfortunately it does not multitask. It does not run from
Workbench. It does not use AmigaDOS. To top it all off, it also has a
nifty copy protection that prevents honest people from making a backup
copy of the original. Other than that it runs fine. There was also a
version made for the Commodore 64. It is similar to the Amiga version
except for the 2-player mode and the command function in Operation
Conquest, both these options were completly removed.

In conclusion I would say this is, all in all, a good flight simulator.
Not the most system friendly (a big shame) and not the best dogfight-sim,
but a very well balanced multirole-mission simulation with interesting
dynamic campaigns to back it up.