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The best modern combat sim ever!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 50 / 60
Date: October 24, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Installed a demo. Don't know what the guys who posted below are talking about but im running demo on my rig with following specs:

Athlon 1700+
ATI Radeon 9500 moded to 9700
SoundBlaster Live! 5.1
513MB of SDRAM

Game settings: resolution 1600X1200, 2x AA, 4x AF

The game is smooth. Geting on average 30 FPS. Physical model is great, graphics is great both environment and landscape (i come from Ukraine so i know how landscape is supposed to look like there:)) The only thing i didn't like was the damage model. But i think it's going to be fixed by the release date.

Of course it is not an arcade game. It is a hard core flight simulation with everithing that this entails. You gotta learn how to fly.

Everyone who is passionate about aviation should get this game!

PS. If your demo isnt running great, check out ubisoft's forums. You can learn how to set up you hardware, drivers, and the game right so it is playable.

This rocks!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 15 / 15
Date: July 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Well I was reluctant to pick this up. A friend advised me that it didn't run on his top of the line PC. He said that it was fine until clouds and weather affects were added and then trouble occured. Anyway eventually I found it in a discount bin and decided to pick it up. It runs brilliantly on my machine, absolutely flawlessly. My box 2.8Ghz, 1Gig Dual Channel Ram, ATI 9600 Extreme. I was so impressed I went and bought myself a set of X45 Saitek HOTAS gear. How much fun is this. Blowing away bandits in an F15 without ever having to touch the keyboard. The sound is only in stereo unfortunately so I can mix up my EAX settings to run it on 4 speakers but a 5.1 setup would have been nice. The graphics put MSFS2004 to shame. It took me a week or so before I was comfortable flying the Eagle and there are more planes to go. The game has a great level of depth and I printed off the Flaming Cliffs manual which helped some too (all 262 pages). Campaign builder takes a little time to figure out - like the whole thing really, but this isn't a console game this is a complex piece of software. Saying all of this the game isn't for everyone, it takes time, patience and an attention to detail to get the most out of it. I spent a week or so readjusting settings till I was happy. Neverthless this has helped my love and interest of flying and quite frankly this piece of software is a hobby for me rather than a game.

The end of dumbing down

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 16 / 20
Date: February 01, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If you are not technically minded, don't buy this game. If you dont know the difference between a directX 9 card and a directX 9 compliant card (one works with DirectX 9 but does some of it in software and is useless for many modern games), dont bother. If you have a computer that is not correctly configured, don't even think about it. If you expect to run the game and play well within an hour, stop reading now.

Now for the rest of us, the ones who are sick of console games and know how to build their own machines so that they run well, irrespective of the age of the components. The ones who are prepared to sit down and actually learn how to use a program, and know that a third party manual is the only way to even begin to do justice to this simulation (it is *not* a game)... This one is for you.

Runs well on my 9500 pro (heavily overclocked, with an artic cooler mod), XP2000+ processer and 1Gb RAM and with all of the simulation settings set to high except water quality and view distance (set to low and medium respectively) - as per the manual recomendations (hint for all the folks with low frame rates!). Mine is not a high end machine, but I took pains to work out what the most stable drivers were for everything before installing this game (catalyst 3.7 for the video, plus latest VIA sound drivers for my onboard audio), because I knew it would be a demanding game... not on hardware, but on software configuration. Mid range hardware seems okay on all the latest games, but it is drivers and general software config that causes problems, ddespite what some of the other reviewers seem to think.

Know what? It worked first time, and it worked well. I'm enjoying going through the LOMAC manual (the one published by Digital Aspirin), learning how to play this beast, and when you get into the zone it is absolutely great.

For example, in one mission, I am tasked with shooting down a valuable and well protected AWACs plane that is patrolling off the coast. It is protected by a pair of F4s and there is a patroling squad of F16s nearby.... all of which totally outclasses and outguns my pair of MiGs. So its a case of tactical flight - flying undetected with stealth (passive non-emitting sensor modes), and a BVR attack on the AWACS from behind, placing the F4s in a position where they are furthest away from my escape vector when I de-cloak and initiate the attack. Following my stike on the AWACS, I head for the deck running, using the mountains as cover and using the low level air density to significantly cut missile range (yes, it even models that!). A long chase follows, with the two F4's and my wingman buying it in a short but fast dogfight, when the F4s elect to cut their altitude for speed and catch up. But I make it home, low level all the way to avoid lock-ons by the F16s, who were following at high altitude taking BVR pot-shots.

Exhilarated is the only word I can use when I made it to my side's air defences, and watched the F16s turn and sulk back home... Mission Accomplished!

Now that's gameplay.

S

Worth the effort

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: January 15, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game about a year ago, and had a really difficult time mastering the learning curve. Since the documentation was so sparse, I mostly laid off trying to master the avionics and just flew it like a dogfighter, flying Sues, MiGs and 15s in "guns only fights, and then just marveling at how beautiful the game was. Mastering navigation and landing was itself a challenge, but I just loved staring out from the cockpit during a descent and feeling very much like I was in a real cockpit in air....the illusion and immersiveness was that real.

Eventually I moved onto other games, but I never removed this game from my hard drive. It felt like a keeper. Now a year later, I've patched it, put some of the add-ons in, and I'm still learning new stuff! I've finally mastered the Su-27 BVR mode and CAC mode. I've also learned how to effectively use EOS and have successfully won missions with it. This is one of those games that you have let grow on you.....at this point I have virtually no doubt that LOMAC is going to be the Falcon4 of the next 5 years. It is going to be slowly patched and modified while hardware grows around it.

I am running an Athlon 2600, with 1GB of PC3200 RAM, and a Radeon 9700 on Windows 2000 SP4. There are a few graphics options I have to turn down, but the game is extremely stable (0 crashes) and gives me playable framerates about 90% of the time at a resolution of 1024x768. Overall the game is very scalable and needs to be tweaked to get the happy medium between performance and eye candy depending on the capabilities of your machine.

I literally can't wait for my next upgrade, and wonder how great this game will look and fly with a fast 64-bit CPU and a next gen video card.

This is a great simulation, and one which will reward you with priceless satisfaction if you are willing to invest the time and effort in learning its intricacies.

System requirements grossly understated, game suffers from an infestation of bugs

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 13 / 16
Date: January 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

While the system requirements may claim that a Pentium 800 processor is sufficient to run this game, take it from me (and from an avid community of Lock-On fans): You will need at least a 3Ghz class Pentium and the best video card money can buy to have this game perform smoothly. With that aside, strap in and ready yourself for a tour de force of corrupt textures and random game crashes (and believe me, there will be lots of those). And when you do happen to see a peculiar artifact (such as a string of out-of-place polygons coming from the sky, or the ground) rest assured, it's not some superweapon of the future; It's just yet another doodad that shouldn't be there; A result of Eagle Dynamic's saddening execution of game that was compiled with an underpaid pseudo-programmer and grossly undertested.

As for the missions and gameplay, it's a proven combat simulator. Don't expect to jump in and start firing missiles away. It will take a few hours to learn and effectively use the weaponry on these aircraft. While I have personally only trained on the A-10, I can say that the few times I managed to finish a mission (in those rare cases when an unexpected game crash didn't reboot my computer) the attention to detail paid to avionics, flight dynamics and damage models was accurately modeled. This is by no means an arcade-themed shooter. Training sessions are thorough enough to teach you the basics needed in effectively using each airplane to the best of its abilities.

While Lock-On comes off as a promising title, its wide array of bugs that plague the game keep it from becoming an memorable gem amongst combat flight-sim enthusiasts. Eagle Dynamics (the game's developer) has been slow in turning around patches in hopes of fixing some fatal flaws (as of 2005, four years after the game's launch, only 2 minor patches have been released).

With such a unlucky combination of flaky code, (forcing the player to re-play some of the missions time and time again due to crashes and freeze-ups) Lock-On should remain in its developer's shop until it matures as a product worthy of a public release.

Simulation

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: June 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The game does exactly what it says it does, it imitates modern air combat. Learning is half the fun and despite a small manual anyone can look on-line with a little effort and find tons of useful information to learn more. The search button on forums is a key thing to understand. Some people complain about stability but the game has never ctded on me once. I run an AMD XP2800+, Leadtek 6600GT graphics card, and 1gb ram. I run everything on high except water (which is the real fps killer along with mirrors). Tons of fps mods are even available if you need them and look for them. I previously ran the game on medium with my XP2800, 512mb ram, and a GfTi4200 and it ran decently as long as everything was medium and water was low. It's all about tweaking, which can take time. The key is to tweak it and then keep at it instead of giving up because once you get cozy with the game you'll start to have the real fun. Getting over the initial learning curve it difficult but I think is probably well worth it if you care to understand some of the top fighters of our time.

Superb Flight Sim - Can only get better!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: March 01, 2004
Author: Amazon User

LOMAC is not perfect but which flight sim is/was? it can only get better - Pay attention to the requirements and try to fly it on Win2000 and WinXP - it does not work (well) with Win98 - ...

The graphics are amazing - the community is great and the developer of the game (Eagle Dynamic) listens and answers on the forums...Again, you need a modern system to run it *unless* you're willing to tune the settings - which is fine too for many players.

... - All the planes are excellent - 8 ones - all with different dynamics!

People complains (Falcon 4 dudes mostly) that there is not a clickable cockpit - what gives! I prefer using a joystick such as a configurable cougar or X45 (best price/performance) along with the keyboard to actually feel my hands reaching somewhere rather than using a mouse in the middle of some dogfights...

There are already many great mods from the community including a Mod Manager/Installer tool named LOMAN ...

Anyhow, you don't have to be an experienced flight sim pilot to fly lomac but it helps for advanced manuvers and such - This is a great sim to get if you want to know more about Jet Fighters in general - The russian fighters are well modded as well as well the US ones...

Patch 1.01 fixed a lot of issues and patch 1.02 is in Beta test - again developing a modern jet combat flight sim is very COMPLEX and it takes a bit of time to stabilize it...

When Falcon 4 was released it was buggy as [can be] - a lot more than LOMAC - many folks remember that.

This SIM can only get better.

P>Get that SIM if you haven't already - I don't mean to say it is a replacement for other sims - I have both Falcon 4 and LOMAC - love them both but LOMAC is something one should get if you see yourself as a flight simmer...

Should have spent another month or two in the hanger.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 12
Date: December 13, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The combat sim market is one that has been steadily shrinking for the past few years, as have the number of gamers willing to put the time and effort it takes to understand fully and enjoy realistic flight simulations. Being such a person, I looked forward to Lock On: Modern Air Combat with much anticipation. Lock On certainly has it sights aimed high; a detailed, realistic simulation of six aircraft, the F-15C, the A10, the Su-27/33, the MiG-29 and Su-25. Unfortunately, while the developers managed to accomplish this goal, Lock On is beset by numerous bugs, performance issues, and questionable code.

Let's start with what is good. I have never flown any of the aircraft featured in Lock On, but the flight models are convincing and "feel" real. For those unaccustomed to flying aircraft, there is an option for an easier, more forgiving flight model, although if you're like me, you'll want to dive in head first with full realism. In addition to the six flyable aircraft, Lock On also models in detail hundreds of ground and sea based vehicles, and you have a large selection of weapons to choose from as well, from the deadly AIM-120 AMRAAM to the awesome SS-N-22 Sunburn anti-ship missile. Reading through the in-game encyclopedia, a hardcore flight simmer could be excused for wetting themselves at the sheer amount of stuff to blow up and bombs and missiles to blow them up with.

Modelling both fighter and ground attack aircraft, Lock On provides you with a good variety of missions to undertake, while other "study sims" often limit you to one type of role. There is also the differing design philosophies of the Russian and American aircraft; Russian aircraft have rather low-tech cockpits, with analog gauges and rather limited radars, while the Americans go for a more high-tech approach. The Russian fights also have the unique helmet-mounted sight, allowing you to simply look at a target in front of you and send a missile its way. The real joy, however, comes in flying the A-10 "Warthog" and busting tanks with the 30mm GAU-8 "Avenger" cannon and wiping out entire convoys with cluster bombs. There's enough variety crammed into Lock On: Modern Air Combat that a dedicated simmer will never get bored.

The graphics engine is a thing to behold as well. Making heavy use of programmable pixel and vertex shaders, you can have water that ripples naturally and reflects things above it perfectly, the heat blur from a jet engine, scratches in the canopy glass that only show up when the sun hits them at the right angle, and countless more graphic details. Explosions and pyrotechnics are similarly spectacular, making your close-range air-to-air kills all the sweeter. Without a doubt, Lock On is one the most visually appealing flight sims out there, and will likely remain so for some time.

Unfortunately, if you wish to play with that level of graphic detail, and more importantly play with a high, stable framerate, you will need a computer that has not been invented yet. And if you have a video card that's not fully DirectX 8.1 compatible (that means you, all you Geforce MX users) then don't even bother with this game until you upgrade. However, even with the graphical details set to the lowest level, the framerate is still unstable and often widely fluctuates, going from 30FPS to about 3FPS when another aircraft flies into view. It seems to be a problem with A-10; whenever there is another A-10 in your field of view, no matter how far away it is, the framerate slows to a crawl. Move the A-10 out of your field of view, and the framerate returns to normal. There are other FPS issues with effects that cause the game to stutter and hang, particularly annoying when trying to blast away at a tank with the A-10's Avenger cannon. These sudden drops in FPS seem to happen regardless of CPU or video card, and Lock On is quite happy to bring your Pentium 4 3.2 GHz with ATi Radeon 9800XT Pro to its knees. While these FPS issues may be resolved in future patches, it makes me wonder if Lock On were pushed out the door before the developers had a chance to fix some of the glaring problems. Ubisoft certainly has a record of doing just that. (Destroyer Command, anyone?)

The bugs and problems aren't limited to the graphics engine, though. Air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles seem woefully underpowered, and weapons like the AIM-120 AMRAAM actually perform WORSE than the AIM-7 Sparrow it was designed to replace. I've seen a Soviet S-300 SAM system fire off at least twenty missiles at my aircraft and all of them exploded three seconds after launch, and I was doing nothing to evade them! Worse still, the American naval units are horribly undermodelled in comparison to their Soviet counterparts. The Slava-class cruiser can launch multiple missiles at targets at great distance and shoot down almost any anti-ship missile fired its way, while the American Ticonderoga-class cruisers, with their Aegis radar system, will never fire at anything further than 20km away and are basically sitting ducks. In addition to all this, sometimes Lock On will crash with a "light blue screen of death" at apparently random intervals. It all adds up to a game that should have at least another month or two in the shop.

The packaging of the game is just awful as well. There is no printed manual that comes with the game, (you have to order one online for an extra $30 or so) just a PDF file, where some of the diagrams are so low-res you can't see what's what. There were also supposed to be series of printed keycards, but these were mysteriously not included.

Truth be told, there is a great simulation tucked away in here. Unfortunately, it's all obscured by a multitude of bugs, design flaws, and unoptimized code. I would strongly recommend that you wait until Lock On is patched up before purchasing it, and as a bonus, it will only cost about $9.99 by then.

A great flight simulation that is a joy to fly

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: September 23, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Developed by Eagle Dynamics, the creators of Flanker 2 , Lock On is a great simulation and a joy to fly.

It requires a good PC (at least a P4 2.0 with 1024 MB RAM) and a 128MB video card (a GForce 5xxx or ATI9800) in order to really enjoy it.

It has already been patched twice and has a great online community that creates missions, skins and campaigns that you can download - and Eagle Dynamics is already developing add-ons for Lock On.

Lock on requires some time to master, but it is easy to learn and, as far as flight simulations go, it is quite intuitive.

Don't miss it!

Lock-UP is a Rip Off

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 13
Date: December 05, 2003
Author: Amazon User

First off, this game should be called LOCK-UP. It has more bugs than you can imagine...just hop onto the Ubisoft Lomac "bug" and "tech" formus. You will quickly realize that the problem is NOT your computer, operating system, video card, sound card, joystick etc.....just the sorry and rushed programming. But the biggest RIP OFF is there NO printed manual or keycard (and the short on disk pdf manual is soooo poor) that comes in the box. The Ubisoft website is charging $30.00 EXTRA for an "bound enhanced manual" (naturally on backorder!). Why could not the "enhanced manual" been that pdf manual that came with the game??????. This is really really cheesy!!!! Scrooge could not have done a better job himself!

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