F-22 Air Dominance Fighter

Rating:
Summary: Do you play games? or do you fly sims ?
Review: DID (now RIP) defined military flight sim specs. Ever heard of EF2000, well that was F22's forerunner. And we are not talking about NovaLogic's arcade version (F22 Lightning) here. ADF features advanced graphics AND advanced flight modelling. Few sims in the world spawned a following on the net such as F22 ADF. Have a look at online squadrons such as the 666th TFS Rogue Squadron and you get the picture. DID recently closed shop.....but the sim lives on amongst thousands of players internationally. Also have a loof at Tactical Air War (TAW), the follow up to ADF.

If you are a pilot, or you are passionate about aircraft then do not hessitate, if you are a fly by night little gamer.........move on

Rating:
Summary: Great F-22 game, but.....
Review: This is a great game, but there are a few things to consider before buying it.

It seems like there were dozens of flight sim games based on the F-22, though that's only because their publishers each released patched versions and sequels in rapid succession, each making evolutionary improvements to the older versions. "F-22/ADF" was the early version of DiD's F-22 game, lacking the AWACS component of its sequel, TAW ("Total Air War"). For a game that was rushed into production (DiD didn't want the missing AWACS component to cause the company lag behind publishers of inferior F-22 games) ADF still tops the competition. Featuring DiD's no-nonensense graphics, sound and flight model (the game is a welcome middle-ground between crude "survey sims" like ATF or USNF, and more complicated "hardcore games" like "Flanker 2.5" or Jane's Longbw), ADF is a game you'll find easy to get into and hard to put down. Though the game shows its roots to EF2000, the power differences between F-22 (with its thrust vectoring, and much more powerful engines) and EF2000 translates to an F-22 that's much easier to fly. On the down side, F-22's avionics suite is confined to three MFD's, not unlike EF2000, but a come down after the mouse-clickable cockpit of "iF-22". Also, when compared to EF2000, much of the avionics seems redundant (three different buttons handle the same job) as if the F-22 design team realized that they had more space than they knew what to do with.

The biggest downside of all is the missing AWACS element, in which you run an air war from your seat on a command plane like teh E-3, able to jump into any F-22 on your board if you want to get up close and personal. For that, you'll need to get TAW. Since TAW includes the F-22 sim, and isn't an add-on for ADF, the earlier game is pretty superfluous.

Another problem is graphics, which are great, but imperfect - especially if you want to run better than 800X600. While teh game supports graphics acceleration, it probably requires a Glide compliant card - this is an old game - and I haven't been able to get it to run in real 3d on my "Open GL" system. Like many old games, it suffers the dominance of an earlier age in which the top ards were made by 3DFX.

Still, if you can pick this game up, you'll still have one of the better F-22 simulations.