Rating: 
Summary: THIS GAME RULES.
Review: this is the best combat sim ever!! I have been a owner since the day it came out. The graphics are great. I have no probs with it. AND..... YOU CAN DOWNLAOD PLANES OFF THE NET! i have 200 difernt planes and i love it ut this game.
Rating: 
Summary: 777 vs. Zero
Review: Ok, yeah it only comes with 7 planes but a few minutes on the net and a few hours downloading and you will have enough planes to last you forever. As a student pilot I fight my instructor (and send him down in flames more often then not) and work on flying routes and such, not great practice, but its fun, oh and if you own FS2002 or 2000 just bring the airplanes over, its fun trying to dogfight in a 777, really it is!!!All in all a good game, AI needs a little help, and if you want a wingman who can hit the broadside of the barn you need to donwload an add-on, but overall its pretty darn good.
Rating:
Summary: Great game
Review: Best flight sim I've used. Doesn't crash my comp and keeps me entertained. Best part is that you are able to DL a/c and missions, as well as campaigns. :)
Rating: 
Summary: Not so hot
Review: So I've been flying flight sims since the days of FS version 1.0, and I was pretty psyched about this game after reading all the reviews. After playing it, however, I've come away somewhat disappointed. It's not a *bad* game, but it's not as good as it could be. What's right:
-Beautiful graphics. This is one pretty game.
-Nice selection of planes to fly, with different and reasonably well-modeled flight characteristics.
-Excellent detail on the engine controls and damage modeling. What's wrong:
-Repetitive, inflexible missions. Take off, accelerate time to target zone, dogfight or bomb, accelerate time home. Yawn. After about five missions I was starting to feel like I'd seen everything.
-Useless wingmen
-Limited radio commands to issue (and the wingmen never seem to listen anyway)
-Useless LSO for carrier landings (and *terrible* looking...couldn't they at least animate him or do him in 3D? He looks like a cardboard cutout!) Follow his instructions and you'll miss the deck every single time.
-No torpedoes. How do you model the Pacific war without including torpedoes? But the reason I was most disappointed with it was that I never got the feeling of being immersed in a bigger conflict...all the missions just seemed very limited and not very interesting. It's a shame - they've got nice graphics and flight models here, but it seems like they never spent the time to flesh out the rest of the game.
Rating:
Summary: Aerial Excellence, almost
Review: This game is the final word (for now) on flight model realism and air combat eye candy. All the aircraft are depicted very accurately and the ordanance effects are done well. In fact, I really have nothing bad to say about the overall experience with one exception. If you have played Falcon 4.0 or even Red Baron II, you have become used to a very involved campaign. In other words, if you decide to deviate from your primary mission in those games, you can be involved in an action/s totally independant from your mission; in other words, the war is alive around you and dosen't depend on you to arrive at a result. Unfortunately CFSII followed CFS1 in one respect-although they call it a dynamic campaign, it is still a series of created missions strung together. However, it is still very hard to complete said missions on "hard" settings and the eye candy almost invites you to allow yourself to die to see what kind of aircraft damage you can absorb and what it's effects are. Overall, it is an improvement and it is a very good product.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but could have been great
Review: Microsoft did a decent job with CFS2, but it could've been so much more. First, it only covers a small portion of the Pacific war. No bombers, strike or torpedo planes are available for the player to fly. Although, all these types are available by downloading third party add-ons, I am amazed that MS left them out. The AI is just horrible, they are absolutely no help at all. MS says that they start out bad and improve with experience, but that is not the case, they start out bad and stay that way. Multi-player, though fun in it's limited capacity, only allows fighter on fighter stuff. No interceptions, no cooperative play, no ground strikes at all, even strafing attacks. There are no provisions at all for any AI in the muli-player set ups! No AI planes are ever landing or taking off with you, you begin all alone in the world and return that way. There was better game play in much older titles, Aces of the Pacific offered more flyable plane types, and included bomb and torpedo missions. Falcon 3 gave the multi-players the ability to fly cooperativel against the AI and even included ground targets., Ditto for Fighters Anthology. Why, oh why, couldn't the great nad mighty Microsoft have included features like this? On the plus side, the graphics are superb, flight models convincing, up until damage occurs. Damage modelling can be a bit ridiculous. A single 7.7mm bullet hole in one wing renders the aircraft almost uncontrollable, ditto the amazingly accurate flak, a single piece of shrapnel through the nose, administered by a bursting 125mm round 100 meters away will render you hors de combat. Having said all of that, I like it, and continue to play it. I hope that CFS3 will finally bring us back....if not, there's always IL-2.
Rating:
Summary: Simply the best flight sim out there
Review: Hello ,
As a real pilot for A A and owner of a Sopwith I can truly say that this is without a doubt the best combat flight sim ever. With all the add ons it can be as much as you want, combined with FS2002 you can't beat it.
Rating:
Summary: The best Microsoft sim yet. Not completely satisfied though.
Review: I've been a flight sim fan since Red Baron from Sierra back in '91 and the first Microsoft flight Sim from back in the 80's. I hadn't played a game this fun and that looks so good in a while. I love the realism of the flight models, they are way better than CFS1. All the other reviews here speak very well of the positive aspects of this game and i totally agree with most of them, so i'm only going to critizice the aspects of the game that I'm displeased with. The first and most annoying thing i've noticed is the damage engine in the game, no matter what damage text come across your screen your plane always seems to get damaged(at least initially) in the same way. Even if it says that your cowling has been hit or your engine, you immediately loose aileron control, your roll rate diminishes a whole lot, basically killing the high manueverablilty of your plane. I have never seen in a mission that my elevator gets hit first or my rudder.
If the game designers wanted to make the game more difficult they should have made the enemy fighters smarter instead of what seems to be on purpose,lowering you down early in the mission to the seeming manueverability and skill of your enemy. Which leads me to the next point; After about 80 kills the game is starting to get too easy, even at 100% realism and playing the campaign in hard, At this point in the campaign I want to start dogfighting enemy aces, and not have to redo the mission because my wingmen even though I've taken care of them and have about ten kills each don't help much, and I end up getting shot down by about 10 enemy fighters while the rest of my squadron just seems to follow me wherever I go even after repeated orders to engage the enemy. Another thing about the campaign that although its minor in comparison to my previous comment is the fact that even while playing as a Jap you can select and fly American fighters from the Airplane Selection/Loadout screen. The last thing that I was really looking forward too specially after i got the hang of the game and started playing a campaign on hard setting, was to see more of the great weather engine adopted from FSIM 2000 PRO. Sure you get to see some nice puffy low altitude stratus clouds with no turbulence and that's it. you never have wind to take into consideration or icing on the wings at high altitude, and even if you design the worst storm you can think of; you'll come back to your carrier to find the big surprise that the ocean looks like a kiddie pool. The waves are probably about 1 feet tall and once on the carrier unless you designed some supernatural gusty winds you'll find that the deck is moving about 1 foot up and down and barely rolling left and right. Just if you're wondering I'm a 24 year old pilot, currently working as a flight instructor with a total of 400 hours of flight time. It is still one of the best games i've played, only harder in difficulty by Janes F-15. I still love the game and that's why I gave the game 4 stars. 5 stars is a simulation that perfectly simulates real life to any posible extent. When something like that comes out we won't have time to be here writing, it will take too much of our gaming time.
Rating:
Summary: Worth Learning
Review: This game is a challenge to learn, but once you do its worth all the work. Very Fun.
Rating:
Summary: Well-done, but demanding ...
Review: If you are a sim purist, history buff or a pilot, you will love this one. Those of us who prefer a good blend of playability with our realism will find the flight model too demanding. Be prepared to constantly fiddle with the trim controls to maintain straight-and-level flight, even with the auto-pilot on. I have found this program to be somewhat unstable on my P-IV machine running Windows ME. It hasn't crashed often enough to be a serious problem, though.
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