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Poorly laid out, unstable

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 9 / 13
Date: December 09, 2004
Author: Amazon User

First, the graphics in this game are top-rate. As a former A-10 maintenance tech, the cockpit is REAL. This IS exactly how an A-10 cockpit looks.

Unfortunately, that's about all I can say about this game.

There is no manual except for the readme on the CD. So be ready with fresh ink cartridges if you want a reference while you're playing. A keyboard foldout would have been excellent. For the original price, I would have expected some print.

The graphics are unstable. I'm running on a Radeon 9600 graphics card, and have been unable to get through a game without the scene crashing to uniform light blue.

The controls key map make no sense whatsoever, and are not ergonomically designed. D cycles weapons, I turns the radar on and P releases drogue chute? How the heck am I supposed to remember that? The padlock key doesn't always work, you have to hit it many times, and then once you're padlocked, you have to hit it again to unpadlock to use other views.

Missions always start you in the air, so you don't get to take-off. I'm so frustrated in trying to get the tutorial missions to work that I've never gotten into the campaign.

I am aficionado of flight sims, and have played all the campaigns of the Janes series. For a much better treatment of the F-15 and especially the F-15's radar, look for Janes F-15. Graphics aren't as modern, but the flight experience is much better.

First thoughts running lock-on

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 11
Date: December 06, 2003
Author: Amazon User

LOMAC is one of the best flight sims to come out after IL-2:FB. But be warned- you have have a decent system in order to truly enjoy this game(at least a P4 2.4Ghz/AMD 2800XP+, 1GB ram, 128GB DirectX9 AGP 8x card. Graphics are compelling with attention to detail for terrain textures, reflecting water and ground shadows. 8 Flyable aircraft in this sim makes for months of enjoyment. Campaigns are not 'true' dynamic but fun to play regradless. THe ability to create highly-detailed missions will add to a large libary of online sites hosted by fans. My current favorite is the A-10 Warthog and even though it's known as the BUF it's a beauty to me! The flight modeling is highly accurate for a sim and should set the standard for some time to come. My only major grief is a lack of a hard-copy manual (they could add $10-$15 to the price if they did this and i'm sure no one would mind) but instead a PDF on the CD. A keyboard reference card is not even included. UBI Soft should send out a hard-printed manual or at least a keyboard reference card to the people who bought this game. Minor bugs are regular for a 1st release so that's not uncommon. Overall, i would have to say i pleased with my purchase.

BEST FLIGHT SIM SINCE JANE'S F/A 18

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: January 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

As you read the customer reviews you will notice that they either hate it or love it. There is no middle ground because if you can't make the sim run reasonably you will, naturally, hate it. But if you can run this outstanding sim you will, I assure you, LOVE IT!. The graphics, the complexity the feel and the amazingly powerful editor make this THE FLIGHT SIM of the day.

I loved Jane's F/A 18 and still fly it although I have not been able to get it to run well under Win XP. I fly F/A 18 under Win 98 on a 800 mhz Pentium. The Lock-On sim needs a powerful PC and I'm getting frame rates from 30 to 80fps on a 3GHZ machine with Win XP and a ATI 9800 video card. There ARE a few bugs and a visit to the UBI Lock-On web site indicates they are working hard to correct problems. A patch has already been posted and it installed on my machine without any hitches.

The program comes with an on line manual which I don't like and think comes up short in places. A printable version is availably on the UBI web site and it prints up nicely under Adobe. I'd like a better manual however and the included booklet that explains running the program itself, especially the mission editor is, at best, slim. I'm still learning how to program a custom mission. But it is coming along... takes patience.

I don't know if UBI will ever deliver additional flyable aircraft. As it is only two US aircraft are flyable... the A-10 and the F-15 Eagle. Five Russian aircraft are flyable and one is a Naval aircraft. It can fly to and land on carriers, including the USN CVN-74. The carrier CLS system is not as realiastic as the Jane's F/A 18, diappointing but maybe a improved CLS will come along with an F/A 18 or Naval JSF. Even with these small disappointments I give this Sim Five well deserved stars. I think it will be improved and look forward to that.

Final word... if you do not have a high end (i.e 2 or 3ghz) processor and good video card AND Win XP don't expect to like this program. It's a modern sim... you need modern equipment.

Ridiculously flawed

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: January 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I made the mistake of purchasing this software, even after reading the comments posted here. I intended to purchase a relatively high-end machine which, essentially, would run nothing but Win XP and Lock On. Additionally, I added a $500 ATI 9800 Radeon video card to the new Pentium 4 3.0 ghz with tons of dual channel high speed RAM. I was convinced that I would not have the difficulty others have reported here.

WRONG!!

After 2 days of exploring every possible configuration (both hardware and software), I have given up, and concluded that this software probably only runs properly on 1 of every 10 machines it's loaded on.

I sincerely congratulate those fortunate few who have had a good experience with Lock On. But, as we read here and as others have reported, the quality of this program must rank among the lowest ever released by a legitimate software concern.
And yes, I loaded the latest patch from Ubisoft. It just doesn't work.

I am not angry because I dropped $39 on this comical collection of ones and zeroes, I'm mad because I spent so much time coaxing it to work.

My advice is to avoid this one, unless you revel in system crashes, mysterious reboots and frozen screens.

Absolute Dreck

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 19
Date: April 18, 2004
Author: Amazon User

These are sad days for flight sims. Gone are the days of Jane's F/A 18 and Falcon 4.0, the days of the truly hardcore sim. What few flight sims we do get are often dumbed-down arcaded shoot em' ups that bear more resemblance to Star Fox than a real simulation. Enter Lock On. It's the latest in what might be considered a dying genre, a fact made all the more shameful by its utterly inferior quality.

Lock On models six aircraft, The A-10, the F-15, the MiG-29, the Su-27/33, and the Su-25, (although the MiG 29 and Su-27/33 are not much different from one another) so one cannot expect the level of avionics fidelity encountered in study sims like Falcon 4.0. Indeed, there are many simplifications in LOMAC, most notably with the radar systems modelling, and that fact alone might turn off many hardcore simmers. Diving deeper into the game, however, the lack of fidelity becomes almost a moot point, because even if LOMAC were as detailed as Falcon 4.0 Jane's F/A 18, it would still be a dull, buggy mess.

Upon starting LOMAC, one will doubtlessly comment on the wonderfully beautiful and detailed graphics. Soon after, one will surely comment on how the game runs like an absolutely dog. Even with the recommended 2.0 GHz Pentium 4, 512 RAM, and Geforce 4 Ti-4200, the game chugs and wheezes its way along like a flabby marathon runner with its horrible stuttering and wildly inconsistent framerates. It's rather difficult to capture a sense of immersion when the game pauses for almost a second to load the explosion effects after scoring a hit on an enemy fighter, or how flying through smoke reduces your FPS to the low single-digits. In order to get the framerates to an acceptable level, one has to go through needlessly convoluted steps such as going in DXDIAG and turning off hardware accelerated sound just so LOMAC doesn't use positional audio (which is quite CPU intensive). The game was clearly designed with only higher-end hardware in mind, and almost no provisions have been made for those with lower-end systems. If you don't have a fully DirectX 8.1 compatible card, you're hardware is not supported, and you can look forward to frequent crashes and Blue Screens Of Death.

Graphical problems aside, LOMAC suffers from one crippling flaw: its utter lack of a campaign system. Oh sure, there's a series of dull, sterile missions canned together that purports to be a "campaign," but LOMAC's not fooling anyone. There's nothing like Falcon 4.0's dynamic campaign here; there's not even anything like Jane's F/A 18 campaign that, although it was not fully dynamic, at least made an effort to be interesting and involving. In LOMAC, you have a series of thinly-linked missions that play out exactly the same each time until you get it right. This has the profound effect of killing whatever replay value the game had, and after the initial "wow" wears off, LOMAC will be quickly collecting digital dust on your hard drive.

There are other gripes, such as the wonky landing physics which allows even the most ham-fisted pilots to put down their aircraft unscathed, the ridiculously useless AMRAAM missiles, the pathetically weak Aegis cruisers, or worst of all, the utter lack of acceptable documentation. LOMAC is perhaps the first flight simulator to come with NO printed manual. There's a little quick start guide which focuses primarily on the mission builder; one has to look on the CD for the, yes Virginia, the PDF manual. The PDF manual that Ubisoft created by copying most of the information from Flanker 2.5. The PDF manual with blurry diagrams that are nearly impossible to read. These days, how can any flight sim that pretends to be "The King of Military Flight Sims" (gag!) ship without proper documentation?

All in all, LOMAC is a frustratingly disappointing product. Don't be fooled by the lack of flight sims on the shelves today. Go find an old copy of Falcon 4.0, or check out the vastly superior IL-2 Sturmovik series. Whatever you do, don't waste your money on this garbage.

I Feel Abused

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 10
Date: December 08, 2003
Author: Amazon User

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.

Worth the wait.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: December 11, 2003
Author: Amazon User

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.

Good, but not great.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 13
Date: January 08, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I've been messing around with flight sims since the days of the Compuserve Falcon Challenge Ladder and flying against aces like Victor "Duke" Z. When Falcon 4.0 came out, I was really impressed, followed by really depressed when Microprose/Hasbro raped and abandoned it.

The out-of-the box experience will depend on how much effort you put into reading the manual, and setting up the game based on the abilities of your machine. If you're in a hurry and just want to blow stuff up, you might be a little disappointed.

The graphics are nice, but not much better than IL-2 Sturmovik.
The learning curve is there, but you have to remember what this sim is and what it isn't. It's not Crimson Skies.

All-in-all, I'd have to say this is a very good sim with a lot of potential, but not as great as all the hype made it out to be a year ago.

Excellent SIM for real enthusiasts

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: September 23, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This is a really good sim. Top notch graphics and high fidelity physics. Beware though, if you have a less than top notch computer.. consider yourself warned. This game needs a 3Ghz 1024mb RAM and 256mb video card to run properly. Anything less will be a compromise. The latest two patches have really fixed a lot of probs that were encounterd in the first release. With the patches and a good computer, this game is a dream come true!

If you like modern combat flight sims that really bring an authentic feel to flying.. choose this game. You can't go wrong here!

Locked-Up!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: December 01, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Requires more than my P4 2.4 processor and 512 RAM can handle, even on XP. The graphics are good, even with the lowest setting, but the game has lots of bugs, causing lots of lockups, crashes and inexplicable 'blue' screens (see similar complaints at the LOMAC website) once I get beyond the simple quick combat missions. I had hoped for something more efficient from Ubisoft, considering how good IL-2 is as a flight sim. This is a disappointment unless they can come up with a substantial patch soon.

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