Fly!
- November 24, 2000 14:47 PM PST
- Email this!
Fly! is the first to make it out of the hangar and this much-hyped and highly anticipated sim from Terminal Reality and G.O.D. comes packed with enough features to completely rewrite the book on desktop piloting. Sadly, this is an aeronautic masterpiece with zits.
- GamePro Score
- User Score
- Write your review!
Fly! is the first to make it out of the hangar and this much-hyped and highly anticipated sim from Terminal Reality and G.O.D. comes packed with enough features to completely rewrite the book on desktop piloting.
Unfortunately, it also exhibits enough broken parts and bugs to seriously diminish its playability for discerning PC flyers. Despite a wealth of innovative features (or maybe because of them), Fly! ranks as one of the more frustrating flight sims I've ever played.
It's impossible not to applaud the work that TRI has put into this simulation. Five different aircraft--the Cessna 172R Skyhawk, Piper Malibu Mirage, Piper Navajo Chieftain, Beechcraft King Air B200 and Raytheon Hawker 800XP business jet--have been modeled in painstaking detail. Each plane comes with the most accurate modeled instrument panels seen in a PC flight sim. In addition to the game's 9500 worldwide airports, five specific scenery areas cover 50,000 square miles around New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas/Fort Worth with greatly enhanced graphic detail.
Flying each of the planes is an exercise in study and dedication. In fact, the engine start-up procedures are so complicated for many of the aircraft that TRI has included a nifty autostart feature to walk you through the lengthy checklist step by step. The flight models, controls and avionics are as authentic as you'll ever see outside of a commercial training simulator. And it's a pretty safe bet that, once you've mastered the myriad of switches, trim knobs, Nav radios, and flight instruments in each plane's cockpit, you'll probably be able to demonstrate a healthy level of proficiency with the genuine article.
You'll find plenty more to gush about in Fly! The ATC (Air Traffic Control) component is superbly implemented and rivals or surpasses anything that has come before. Weather settings (including some gorgeous volumetric clouds) can be configured manually or players can choose to download real world meteorological data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the ultimate in realism. TRI has also set up a free Internet matchmaking service for multiplayer flying and included an entire CD of scrolling sectional charts --the game comes on three CDs-- to keep pilots on course during lengthy VFR flights. Cataloging the massive feature set that Fly! brings to the flight sim world would take a small book to relate.
So with all of these things going for it what's left to criticize? Two things: bugs and broken features. Despite having devoted more than 36 hours to the sim, I can only claim about 10 of actual flight time due to persistent lockups and crashes. I can't begin to tell you how frustrating it is to hit the reset button for the umpteenth time after my screen freezes moments into the final approach of a 3-hour IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) flight.
Part of the problem may be with Fly!'s steep system requirements. If you don't have a PIII with 128MB RAM and the hottest 32-bit TNT card, many of the features will be inaccessible. Frame-rates on my PII/300, Voodoo3 3000 AGP rig were singularly unimpressive, disk-access pauses to load scenery data were lengthy and persistent and the 16-bit limitation of my 3Dfx accelerator meant that I wasn't able to appreciate the game's 32-bit graphics in >all their intended glory. I also had to opt for a medium 800MB install because I simply didn't have space the game's whopping 1.6-gigabyte full install!
Even if your tower has the right stuff, you will still have to contend with many bugs. Some of these are unforgivable such as the reversed ILS (Instrument Landing System) needles and the Hawker 800 XP's non-functioning Flight Management System computer while others, such as inaccurate terrain elevation modeling and a slipping parking brake are simply annoying.
I'd best end this rant here, because if I turn this review into a bug list I'll need a few more paragraphs just to work through them all.
At its core, Fly! is like a choice cut of Filet Mignon laced with fat and gristle. You'll have to deal with significant chunks of unsightly-and nonfunctional-code on your plate. But if you have the patience to pick through its good bits while waiting for the patch to arrive, you could experience some fine dining.
