Flightsim Recommendations

Lately I've been interested in getting into PC (combat)flightsims as I seem to have been playing FPSs and other genres instead for the past decade & half. My experience with this once PC-centric genre is very limited so I'm looking for recommendations by flightsim gamers/enthusiasts/veteran PC gamers.

If you dig WWII combat, Get IL-2 Sturmovik.

The one from 2001 to be exact. Also Flanker 2.0 and 2.5.

If you don't mind old games, there's a range of sims developed by Digital Integration that I've always found to be very enjoyable.

The F-22 games from Novalogic were great too.

Red Baron and A11 Tank Killer are good ones too.

Folk call Tie fighter a flight sim and who am I to disagree? Track down a copy if you haven't played it yet. If you're feeling slightly masochistic you might want to try X-Wing and X-Wing Alliance as well, but you better have a well made joystick, because you will be throwing it across the room.

Crimson Skies is also great fun here's a review.

X3 is sort of a modern Elite, where you roam about space doing missions for folk to get cash and buy bigger and better ships/weapons/upgrades. Sometimes referred as single player Eve, as you start out flying one dinky little space ship and can end up commanding a fleet of ships the size of new york. Takes a bit of a time investment though. If that sounds a bit daunting you might want to start with Elite's free modern remake Oolite.

Ok, those fit the mold of 'flight sim' pretty loosely. Want super realistic? try this bastard:

That is DCS: Black Shark. A super realistic Helie-chopter sim for those folk who care for that kind of thing. from what I nderstand, that start up sequence can be skipped, but i think it gives a pretty good indercation of how hardcore this game gets.

If you are into space sims, then I'd recommend Freespace 2 and the Independence War games. They are definitely up there in quality with the X-Wing series.

Captain Red said:

Elite's free modern remake Oolite

+1. This game is heaps of fun and more addictive than crack. You can also have it look as old-school or fancypants 3D as you like.

It's also designed to be extremely easy to mod for. Although I found most available mods tended to be cheap copies from other IP (eg: Star Wars ships) or upset game balance.

Operation Overlord is a good classic WW2 Flight Sim.

Since people posted games that follow the flight sim theme quite loosely I'll mention another title that I have a soft spot for: Commanche 3. If you can dig up the gold edition, you might find it's arcade/sim blend of gameplay entertaining.

Stay away from Commanche 4 though, unless you like mindless arcade shooters like Thunderhawk 2.

I know as of yet you haven't expressed any desire for space sims, but let me break it down for you like this:

Freespace 2: Free download, open source engine, and the best military space sim since TIE Fighter. Honestly, though, it's hard to get better than TIE Fighter for this genre, even with the game's age.
X3: Amazing trading/resource sim. You will spend a LOT of time on this game if you get into it. It's quite complicated. The storyline is laughable, but really, that's not why you'd be playing it. The menu driven fleet command and automation is pretty damn awesome.
Oolite: Simple and oldschool. Play if you're not planning on investing a ton of time into the game.

I used to play an old flight sim called F-29 Retaliator on the AtariST. Theres an version on PC too, that actually supports net play. But I never managed to land the plane in the PC version. In the Atari version it was a rather engaging procedure, that for some reason didn't work at all in the PC version.

Man, I haven't played flight sims in forever. The ones I did play were Corncob 3-D, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, and F-15 Strike Eagle III. I played a bit of A-11 Tank Killer, too, but don't remember much of it.

Chuck Yeager's Air Combat was fun because you could make up your own missions to run. F-15 Strike Eagle had some good missions, and you could customize your payload and get medals and promotions (I ranked up a lot of purple hearts, heh).

Sadly, those are all pretty old and it would be hard to still find them plus their graphics are very dates (especially Corncob 3-D which was basically giant monocolor polygons floating in the sky).

Corncob was rad, I spent ages walking around that world as a kid, it seemed huge at the time! As you say though, it's not exactly what I'd call realistic.

kristus said:

I used to play an old flight sim called F-29 Retaliator on the AtariST. Theres an version on PC too, that actually supports net play. But I never managed to land the plane in the PC version. In the Atari version it was a rather engaging procedure, that for some reason didn't work at all in the PC version.

I couldn't do it either, even following the instructions from the included text file.
But it is possible, in more ways than one:

Of course, where there's C:\RETAL one can't forget C:\LHX :).