Rating: 
Summary: Wait for the bug fixes before you buy.
Review: I just installed Lock On and tried to make it run on three different computers.One with Xp Home the other 2 with Windows Millenium. All with good graphics cards and 512 memory.None worked.It crashes at start up or gives you a white screen and a partial menu on the left and then it crashes.I checked out the forums at Lock On site and I found numerous complains about the same problem and no date for a patch fix from the people at Lock On.
Rating: 
Summary: Great game - could be better
Review: This game is the best combat simulator I have played yet. It was definatly worth the price, but I do think that it could be better. My computer is no slouch, but even with a 2.5G Pentium 4, 512 Meg and a GeForce Ti4200, the game jumps and runs slow even on lower settings. It takes a fully equiped computer to live up to this games full potential. I would have liked to see more air-to-ground combat options in this game and more strike fighters. Otherwise, the game is great and I would definately recommend!
Rating:
Summary: Excellant Graphics But a Little Early
Review: The Graphics are really very cool, I was amazed with the design and development and (not being a game player) I bought this for the first time in my life, May be Ubi Soft's marketing team had this idea in mind (dont make joke of me as if it isnt) that to rush the game out before christmas, but rather it turned out to be a bundle of problems, 50% of the buyers are selling out more fast then they are buying because their systems cannot support, I mean what do you require? a Cray Super Computer? I'm running a 3000+ AMD with 1024MB DDR, what else do I require to play a decent game? still it took a little to load + some problems arising more, blue green graphics etc, so Best Suggestion is, to buy it after some time (say 2 Months), by that time they should have fixed that bugs, over all I must say, Game is Excellant.
Rating:
Summary: Should have stayed LOCKED IN
Review: After waiting for a long time, reading reviews and screen shots, I thought this would have been "One of the all time best" for a flight sim...well, I will not mention my experience / problems since some of the "Real flight sim gamers" have put it very nicely...but I will add that this is NOT a Janes USAF four years later...
XP/2.8/128 video/512 ram.
Yes, patches might improve this game, but that remains to be seen.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth the wait.
Review: Surely the most eagerly anticipated combat simulator in years, Lock On: Modern Air Combat finally hit the shelves in the US in mid November and the rest of the world some three weeks later. I bought my copy the day of it's release and it did not even get as far as the shelf. A spin off of the Flanker series, which culminated in Flanker 2.51 a couple of years back, Lock On was developed by the same team comprising mainly Russian programmers who really know their stuff. The Eagle Dynamics team, led by Americans Carl Norman and Matt Wagner, is about as knowledgeable as any sim development group could be and have created a modern jet combat sim which has few peers.
Developed over a three year period and punctuated on a regular basis with updates, Lock On promised to be the jet combat sim to beat all. So how does it stack up? Well in terms of authenticity, it's as good as Jane's F/A-18 and the now-legendary Falcon 4.0. In terms of immersion, it compares with my all time favourite, Red Baron 3D. That combination should be enough but in actual fact, we have not yet seen the best of Lock On yet.
Before I bought the game, I spent a lot of time flying the demo, which can be downloaded from www.lo-mac.com gratis. This proved to be time well spent because it gave me a good insight into what to expect from the real thing. Initially I had some minor controller issues but after sorting them out I became fully immersed in it. There are two missions provided with the demo: a MiG 29 mission and an A-10 mission. Both are extremely enjoyable but only give you a vague idea of just how good this title really is. It also doesn't give any idea of the nasty shock which Win98 users could be in for.
Realistically, nomatter what the minimum requirements on the box, you will need at least a 2.0 GHz CPU and 512 MB of RAM. You will also need a DirectX 9.0-compliant graphics accelerator. For the time being, you will also need WinXP as it will not currently work with Win98, even though the demo will. A patch to correct this is already in the beta stage and is expected in the next few weeks. I imagine that UbiSoft will actually re-issue the game, including the patch.
My copy installed perfectly but in the initial stages, I had several incidents when my frame rate dropped to an slideshow. This was pretty much eliminated by the installation of the new NVidia ForceWare 52.16 drivers which are designed to work with DirectX 9.0 or better. These are totally new drivers and I would recommend that you carefully uninstall any remaining Detonators before installing 52.16 drivers.
What's it like? It's brilliant. The flight models really do bring a smile to the face of any hard-core simmer, especially anyone like me with actual flying hours. These aircraft fly beautifully. The flight model is far superior to Falcon 4.0 and Jane's F/A-18, though these titles, particularly Jane's, will remain on my hard drive for a long time to come.
Lock On is a totally immersive sim and I love it. The quick combat missions seem a little "arcady" but there is a lot more to them than that. You have six aircraft to choose from: F-15, A-10, Su-27, Su-33, MiG-29 and Su-25. The plethora of Russian types is just one of the many things which make it so much fun. I had an amazing tussle with a MiG-27 only last night and managed to shoot him down just as I ran out of fuel. That's what gets me in.
The graphics are gorgeous and we've only just begun. The skins, the cockpits, the explosions etc. are all state of the art. Remember folks: this is Lock On 101. Wait until the add-on people get into this one and watch what happens. I just hope it will somehow be possible to make the cockpits "clickable", as in Jane's F/A-18, since it is the only thing missing. This would have been almost impossible to include in the original as, with six different types to cover, the amount of coding time required would have been prohibitive.
Lock On has receive no small amount of criticism from disappointed buyers who have had problems with bugs. They are right to be disappointed but this is to be expected. Developing a state-of-the-art combat simulator is a huge undertaking and much as they try, the developers can only do so much. Much of this will be corrected with time. However, we are not talking of the types of problems which have afflicted the now-notorious Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 3. Lock On will survive and survive well. Matt Wagner, Carl Norman and the team should be well pleased with themselves.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I Dont know what all thr griping is, the world has needed another combat sim for a LONG time, and this delivers excellently.
Rating:
Summary: I Feel Abused
Review: Lets just focus on the fact that this game does not come with any kind of manuel. In fact, you have to buy the manuel for $30 more dollars. How on earth can a flight sim come with no manuel. How on earth can they actually expect you to pay extra for it. Flight sims are complex, involved, and require a lot of commands to learn and play the game properly. Especially this one. The game also requires a pretty high end system to run well, and not to mention its buggy release is completely pitiful. Don't buy this game. If software companies can release a game like this and make a profit, god only knows what we are instore for in the future. And as far as giving this game a chance, ok, wait till its price goes way down, they give us a manuel, they fix it, and the technology catches up. Then maybe it will be a good purchase. This is a complete abuse of a consumers trust.
Rating:
Summary: Buy it!!!!!!!!!!! it's the best flight sim of 2003
Review: Lots of comments in these reviews about how bad the game is, poor frame rates etc. well all I can say is that for me it loaded Ok and ran Ok straight from the box. I don't know how to get a frame rate figure, but on my system (P4 2.6ghz, Radeon 9600TX 128Mb Windows XP 512Mb ram) running at 1024x768 the graphics are extremely smooth, and look breathtaking. The game is very customisable, and the readme file does say you will have to play with your settings in the options menu. Time spent setting things up here will pay off later - even your joystic responses can be trimmed (and need to be!). I still have some tweaking to do to stop "overgee-ing" when only making small joystick movements, but the tools are there in the options menu to allow me to do this, unlike on some games. I only had one problem and I the time I thought it was quite major - when running the game in "high" graphics mode, jagged green vertical lines appeared on the screen, which were annoying, but then I found that setting the "haze" value to "basic" eliminated them but still gave good looking graphics, so now I'm very happy again. This is definitely the best flight sim of this year, and if you only buy one game this Christmas, make it this one - well done ubisoft/eagle it's been worth the wait just to come in at tree op level in the A10 and lay that avenger gun onto a T80...brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp!....bang! If you want to try it, there is a downloadable demo on the ubisoft game website, once you try it, you will buy it! Next purchase for me?....... a TrackIR2 as lock on supports this bit of kit, and I haven't got a third hand available to move the mouse to look around the cockpit. To sum things up, this is Janes USAF, 4 years on, but better, and working on XP (albeit without the F16,F117,F4 and F105, but with the Mig 29, SU27, SU33, and SU25) I only gave it 4 stars because it does require some patience in the setting up, Had this not been necessary then it would have got 5 stars
Rating:
Summary: BEST BOREDOM SIMULATOR!
Review: This is one of the worst games I've played. I was expecting to blow things up and scream thru the air with awesome special effects, something like in Ace Combat for PS2. Instead, I got dozens and dozens of tedious little keyboard buttons I had to learn (joystick is pretty much useless in this game), slowest gameplay, NO ACTION, boring scenes, ugliest user interface and maps! Try accelerating/throttling the jets in this simulator; you can barely tell the difference. Feels like you are watching some slow-motion video thru out the entire simulation. There's no way flying any JET aircraft can be this boring. C'mon, I'm flying fighter jets, not some lame aircraft from Microsoft Flight Simulator! Some realistic simulator this is. However, I think this game is a great BOREDOM SIMULATOR. I'm running Athlon XP 2800+ 512MB DDR with super fast ATI Radeon AIW 9700! Well beyond recommended system requirements! But this game crawls, with occasional choppy pauses. To top it all off, it takes forever to load. Playing and waiting for this game is incredibly stressful. Biggest waste of my money and time! NEGATIVE 2000 STARS!
Rating:
Summary: Lock-UP is a Rip Off
Review: First off, this game should be called LOCK-UP. It has more bugs than you can imagine...just hop onto the Ubisoft Lomac "bug" and "tech" formus. You will quickly realize that the problem is NOT your computer, operating system, video card, sound card, joystick etc.....just the sorry and rushed programming. But the biggest RIP OFF is there NO printed manual or keycard (and the short on disk pdf manual is soooo poor) that comes in the box. The Ubisoft website is charging $30.00 EXTRA for an "bound enhanced manual" (naturally on backorder!). Why could not the "enhanced manual" been that pdf manual that came with the game??????. This is really really cheesy!!!! Scrooge could not have done a better job himself!
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