Korea/hornet 3.0 Bundle Side-by-side

Rating:
Summary: Still one of the best simulations around
Review: F/A-18, released in '97 is still in many ways, superior to current releases. The first thing I noticed was how crisp and beautiful the cockpit was. DI's upcoming Super Hornet and Jane's F/A-18 both feature fuzzy, poorly designed cockpit art. Since this is something I'm staring at most of the flight, I feel it's an important point.

The scenery, although fairly generic, is also VERY crisp and unlike recent sims I've seen (Flanker 2 for example), the colors are actually quite beautiful and natural looking.

Carrier ops are fabulous. Absolutely the best I've seen up til now. The feeling of landing a crippled Hornet on a carrer deck at night is just incredible. There are also other aircraft trapping at launching all the time which really add to the realism.

The avionics, while far from unrealistic are missing several ECM modes which I believe will be available in Janes and DI's upcoming releases. The A-A modes are complete and very satisfying, but there are problems with the one of the A-G modes in properly rendering the terrain. This is probably due to the rather coarse poly mesh making up the terrain.

It is also this large mesh that's responsible for the extremely fast and consistent frame rates even on mid-range machines under Glide (Korea does not support D3D).

There is no dynamic campaign, but the game does include 28 scripted missions in Korea and there are hundreds more available for free download at GSC's Korea website. Some of them are quite good. You can design your own missions to some degree of complexity with the built-in mission editor.

Korea provides a wonderful CD-Based training classroom, with dozens of topics. This is some of the best training material I've ever seen in a flightsim. It also comes with a beautiful manual written by a genuine Hornet driver.

All in all Korea is a very solid product which you shouldn't pass up at this price. You even get a copy of the non-accelerated Hornet 3.0 which is REALLY FAST on systems without 3D hardware.

Although are are many features in hte upcoming DI and Janes offerings, Korea will always posess a certain "feeling" of flight that other GSC sims have provided. Janes has never been able to capture that inertial feel in their games, and IMO, the graphics are just sharper and more refined than the screenshots I've seen of these new sims.