Product Description

Combat Flight Simulator WWII Europe Series is the closest you can get to being a WWII fighter pilot! Enlist in the air force of three nations during World War II: The British RAF, the German Luftwaffe, or the U.S. Air Force. Feel the rush of danger and excitement, as you battle for control over the skies of Europe! Force feedback and multiplayer support

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3297 in Video Games
• Brand: Microsoft
• Released on: 2003-12-16
• ESRB Rating: Everyone
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows Me
• Format: CD-ROM
• Dimensions: .44 pounds

Features

• Fly eight realistically-modeled airplanes from the WWII era, with real flight performance modeling and detailed cockpits
• Realistic, detailed landscapes of war-torn cityscapes - shoot down your enemies over the skies of Berlin, London, and Paris
• Import new planes, missions and scenery for variety -- experience a dogfight over New York, with planes that never flew in WWII
• Multiple campaigns - Quick Combat, Free Flight or two actual military campaigns -- Battle of Britain or Battle Over Europe. Collect your orders and jump into air-to-air and air-to-ground combat
• Advanced AI gives players a mix of flying aces, average pilot and rookies to face in battle

From the Manufacturer
With Combat Flight Simulator, you can experience that same unsurpassing level of realism and freedom of expandability as the award-winning Microsoft Flight Simulator, with the rush and excitement of WWII air combat over Europe.

Features:

• Fly eight historically accurate planes
  Eight modeled aircraft, each with its own realistic flight models and accurately detailed cockpits. You will experience the real flight performance of each aircraft, and of course damage will affect specific aircraft systems on each plane.
• Realistic landscapes
  The war-torn cityscapes of Berlin, London, and Paris are rendered in realistic detail. Spot, chase, and shoot down your enemies in deadly one-on-one dogfights over famous landmarks, including the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben.
• Add more aircraft, missions, and scenery
  Import thousands of aircraft from the Internet or from Microsoft Flight Simulator,--strap guns and damage profiles to your planes and fly them into battle in Combat Flight Simulator. Imported planes have firing capability and can be destroyed by enemy fire. Or, bring in your favorite scenery from Microsoft Flight Simulator and experience a dogfight over a modern-day-city.
• Campaigns, missions, quick combat, or free flight
  Choose your campaign: Battle of Britain or Battle Over Europe. Collect your orders and fly dozens of historically accurate missions involving air-to-air duels with enemy fighter planes and air-to-ground bombing raids. Jump into "Quick Combat" for fast action or go sightseeing around Western Europe in "Free Flight" mode.
• Advanced artificial intelligence
  Combat Flight Simulator constantly calculates flight stick positions for every enemy plane. Each aircraft is controlled by a sophisticated sighting system that combines realistic fields of view, visual range, and pilot experience level. Expect to face a mix of aces, average pilots, and novices in battle.
• Fly the real thing
  The realistic flight models, based on Flight Simulator, will challenge pilots to learn the different characteristics of each airplane. The performance of each aircraft has been tested and validated by WWII pilots including pilots of the Ghost Squadron.
• Realistic damage
  Watch fragments fly off your enemy's plane as he plummets to earth in a spin--you'll see white smoke from a damaged coolant system, black smoke from burning oil, and debris from explosions that feature accurate radii. Use evasive moves to avoid enemy fire or flying pieces of shattered planes, which can cripple aircraft systems and flight controls.
• Detailed, historically accurate cockpits
  The instrument panel in each aircraft is modeled after its real-world counterpart, including metric gauges on the panels of the German planes.
• Force-feedback support
  Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator will use the industry-standard technology and build on the success of this feature in Flight Simulator 98.
• Multiplayer support
  Compete or cooperate with up to eight other pilots in WWII over the Internet or on the MSN Gaming Zone at www.zone.com.

Customer Reviews

Don't turn it down just cuz it's a jewel case....
I've got the first 2 entries in the CFS series, and have mixed feelings about each of them. I suspect that the series takes a radically new turn in CFS3, but I can't be sure. CFS1 and CFS2 look and fly pretty much the same - building a military flight sim out of the tried and true MS Flight Simulator engine (which has the double benefit of feeling and looking real AND the ability to add-on 3rd party aircraft). Unfortunately, the developers took the concept of "MS Flight Simulator with guns" too seriously and never craft much of a military sim to go with the engine - the missions are canned and the campaigns are not only scripted, but short. In CFS: Europe, you can fly allied or axis missions in one of two campaigns - the Battle of Britain (mostly over southern UK, summer-early fall, 1940) or the one for western Europe, 1943. Though the lack of American missions are understandable for the first campaign (Pearl Harbor was still over a year away when the "Battle of Britain" came to an end) the lack of flyable British missions in the second campaign is odd. As a yankee, you'll start out flying the not-very-spritely P-47, before progressing to the faster and more nimble Mustang (and boy, will you feel the difference). Bombers appear in the game, but CFS is strictly a fighter-flyable affair. Ofcourse, if you want to tweak the game yourself, you can find scenery, aircraft and missions to suit your tastes, but that still doesn't excuse how bare a sim CFS is - it's almost as if the programmers decided that there was no point to adding in a wider variety of planes, weapons, scenery or campaigns since they knew that serious users would do it themselves. The game engine is pretty, and allows hardcore users to take real control of their planes (start-up, manifold pressure, mixture, et. al.), but it's nothing spectacular. Ground modeling looks pretty, but there's little complexity to it - bit-mapped images (and not much variety to them) "painted" on naturally irregular topography. Ground targets have very basic damage modeling - hit them enough and they just disappear in unconvincing, "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" style fireballs. Some of the missions seem a tad unrealistic - sending short-ranged Spitfires on strafing missions across the channel when the RAF had barely enough fighters of any kind to stem the tide of Luftwaffe bombers? The missions are also repetitive, though real WWII pilots probably flew an even lower variety of missions than you'll find flying a single tour here. Still, your American bomber formations always meet a small number of the same kinds of fighters - FW-190's and Me-109's. The early German jets appear - but only as ground targets in a late-war mission. You can add AI (that is, non-flyable) aircraft as well, but not as easily. The variety of add-on planes is as limitless as the imagination of the flight-sim community, but is otherwise constrained by the fact that this is a WWII sim. That means that you can fly F-14's against Mitsubishi A6M's ("Splash the Zeros, I say again, SPLASH the Zeroes!"), but you can forget about using the complex sensor suites and sophisticated weapons of modern aircraft on this game (and, as with all entries of the MS Flight Sim series, vertical movers like helos or Harriers are limited in terms of simulating hover-flight). Flight is challenging, but slidable realism allows newbies a softer learning curve. The fluid sense of flight is lacking though - with cloud effects looking less convincing than those used on "EF2000" from 1996. Better effects were found in "Jane's WWII Fighters" which also had more compelling enemies, and a more dynamic campaign (if a more prosaic flight engine).

In short, this is a basic game - good for those who want a simple and fun WWII sim, but can't run the Jane's game.

Shoot 'em up over Europe!
I own Combat Flight Simulator: WW II Europe, (this review) in addition to CFS 2 (Pacific) and CFS 3 (Europe).

Even thought this is the earliest and most basic of the three-game series, I find it more challenging than CFS 2 due to aircraft seemingly moving at a faster pace than CF2 (and also more detailed ground views), but a bit slower than CF3.

Participants can choose missions representing USAAF, RAF or Luftwaffe perspectives, such as dogfighting other fighters, escoring or attacking bombers, attacking ground targets, and more.

There are training missions and one-time missions as well as campaigns.

You earn a new respect for how difficult airmen from World War II had it in attacking targets and trying to survive in deadly combat. (By the way, there is one World War I biplane included in the mix.)

I prefer the without-cockpit view with the needed info in the upper right corner.

So, get a fast computer and a good joystick and let's fly!

Marine Sentinel takes to the air!!
I've always enjoyed CFS 2 and 3 and was extremely excited to find the original. This is great!