F/A-18 Operation Iraqi Freedom review:3 stars (Review for the Alaska Apple Users Group) - I mentioned in a recent review that there was a lack of combat flight simulators for the Mac. Now, with Graphsim's release of F/A-18: Operation Iraqi Freedom, there's one more cat in the fight!

Hornet is a fairly accurate simulation of the Navy and Marine Corps' premier multi-role fighter. The nature of the aircraft provides a lot of variety in missions; both air-to-air and air-to-ground, which explains a lot of Hornets lasting popularity.

Its return is most welcome. The previous release, F/A-18 Hornet: Korea, has been on sale for a long time and was a great sim, but has been left in the dust by advancements in console and Windows games. Unfortunately, this new version doesn't bring Hornet back up to par.

OIF is little more than Korea running natively in Mac OS X. It does sport a few improvements and the campaign has moved from southeast Asia back to the Iraqi theater familiar to Hornet 2 pilots, but by and large it is still the same game that was considered old five years ago.

Not only have there been few upgrades, but some things have actually gotten worse. The useful user interface found in previous versions has been replaced by a simplified but less informative menu system. Options that don't fit neatly into the limited menus, such as network setup and callsign changes, now appear in unsightly Classic-style dialog boxes. Functionally, the weapon load out and mission briefing screens actually provide much less information than they used to.

You usually have wingmen, but the AI hasn't been improved. On my first flight back at the controls I got to watch "two" turn into a lawn dart while trying to put guns on a bandit that was already crashing all by itself.

In the cockpit there's no longer a free-look control; you're now restricted to fixed perspectives or a target padlock. Further, whenever you switch the camera to follow another vehicle your game play is interrupted by a "synchronizing view" message that interrupts the flow of your mission and makes long-range visual IDs a pain.

What's more disappointing is that the simulation itself has received so little work. The F/A-18 is still the only texture-mapped aircraft in the game and the variety of friendly and enemy units hasn't increased.

On the up side, the terrain is now textured with satellite images that are a significant improvement over previous versions. It's not as nice as the leading Windows sims, but it does look pretty good from about twenty thousand up. Of course that just makes the flat shaded polygon aircraft seem even more out of place. All of this does drive low system requirements and high performance though.

It's pretty obvious that the only real progress has been in the background. It's a Carbon port so it doesn't require Classic to play and HID support has been added so most new sticks and other controls will work fine. No progress was made in the multiplayer department though. The UI is ugly, requires manual IP address entry, and lacks the GameRanger support that Korea had.

It's clear that Graphsim is not as active as it used to be. The result is a release whose age is accentuated by the two-year gap between the Windows and Macintosh versions. The bottom line, though, is not that Hornet hardly competes with modern Windows flight sims.

The bottom line is that this modest update still makes it the only combat flight sim you can buy in an Apple Store for OS X. Here's hoping that the competition heats up soon!
F/A-18 Operation Iraqi Freedom Features:
Computer Games
Flight Simulators (Simulations)
Flightsimulator flightsim
Flying
Air
Strategy (Strategic)
Historical (historic) Recreation (Recreations)
Military (Wargames
Macintosh (Machintosh)
Mac
Apple
Action
Adventure
Computer Role Playing Games (Game, crpg, crpgs, rpg, rpgs)
CD

F-A-18 Operation Iraqi Freedom is the CD-ROM version. The full version can be purchased by clicking on the "CLICK HERE TO ORDER" button below for around 39.99USD.