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worst in CFS series

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: November 29, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I've been looking forward to get into the CFS3 cockpit after experience with previous CFS & CFS2 titles, as well as long time fan of MSFS series.... after MSFS2002 I've been expecting a lot; wrong. Badly disappointed, won't repeat what other reviewers already mentioned; the game is just plain bad.

Don't buy it; get Il-2 Sturmovik for a decent WW2 air combat instead, or even old WW2 Fighter from Janes will give you more fun.

It's got problems

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: February 09, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I think what Microsoft did with this game was take the simulator engine from the Flight Simulator series and wedge it into this game. The trouble is the Flight Simulator engine was intended for high accuracy and realism; when you fly solo it's not too bad, but when anything else is on the screen the game slows down to being almost useless.

I have an Athlon XP-2000 with 768mb of RAM and a Geforce4 Ti-4600 and I have to turn the display setting quality almost all the way down to make the game playable in combat. The only thing faster is a Radeon 9700, so I wonder how Microsoft expected people who are mostly using Geforce3's and Radeon 8500's to play this game.

I haven't experienced any system crashes, but I have had weird stuff happen like parts of the landscape becoming taken over by colored dots, seeing a texture from a P-51 being laid on a mountaintop, or having the sky overhead become overwritten with a green and white pattern that I realized was one of the system message windows.

Most importantly, though, is this just doesn't feel like the same game. Combat Flight Simulator 2 was a quantum leap in performance and realism, and was just plain fun. CFS3 takes us to Europe, which was already done in CFS1. This isn't the Combat Flight Simulator game I knew, it's a knock-off. Your fighter flies like a real airplane, the enemy seems to always have aircraft that can do twists and turns that would put a UFO to shame. The "new" feature of the game, to select airbases and the like to attack, is an attempt to make it more like a strategy game, which doesn't work very well.

Maybe some time late this year with the R400 Radeon and a 3.5 Ghz processor CFS3 might be playable, but even then it wouldn't be a very fun game.

enjoyable

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: April 10, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I dont profess to be a wwII pilot or a flightsim geek, but i found the game to be enjoyable. The graphics are good, but dont expect to get good results with less than windows xp or outdated graphics card. Also, get a joystick. Action is realistic, realism of the planes is good, and you have to practice to acquire skill to get good at this thing. I think its superior to Sturmovic.

This is a piece of manure from Microsoft

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 19
Date: June 24, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Short version: It. Does. Not. Run.

Take your money and set fire to it, you'll save time trying to troubleshoot this piece of crud -- it just wasn't written very robustly. Or, if you'd rather, buy it and spend three hours downloading various patches and trying to tweak various settings on your machine trying to get it to function.

The emperor wears no clothes. This is badly written software and it should not be purchased by anyone for any reason. Microsoft produces trash as far as I'm concerned and I'm angry with myself for not remembering that, I wanted to play this game, I wanted it to FUNCTION on a basic level AND IT DOES NOT DO SO. THIS SOFTWARE DOES NOT FUNCTION. DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME!

Not bad. Great graphics but needs a lot of set up time...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: November 21, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Anyone who played Microsoft's previous title, CFS2 will know that it wasn't a bad title. So, for most people, CFS3 comes as a disappointment. There have been many complaints ranging from poor framerates and stuttering to lock ups and in my case, uncommanded reboots. Microsoft released an upgrade patch which was supposed to correct these faults but actually, in some cases, it created even more problems than it resolved.

A bit of research, especially reading the Microsoft CFS3 site, will give a very good idea of how to set up the game and get it to run well. I was initially very disappointed but after uninstalling and reinstalling the game the way Microsoft recommended, most of my problems have disappeared. The game has become well supported now on the internet and anyone experiencing difficulties should check sites such as SimHQ for any solutions to their problems. A little patience will make a huge difference. Video drivers are a critical issue here but the specifics are beyond the scope of this review.

The game is also very hardware hungry. You will need to be running a fairly high end system for it to look any good or you might have to live with turning off a lot of detail. A 2.0 GHz CPU and a 128 MB graphics card would be a realistic requirement but you can get good results with lower spec machines if you are prepared to live with less detail. Read the recommended sites for more information.

Now for some good news. If you have set it up properly and you are running a fast machine, i.e.: over 2.0 GHz, it looks fantastic. The flight models are pretty good and the gameplay, whilst a little different from CFS2, is good in its own right. The aircraft detail is amazing and the clouds and terrain are like nothing I have seen before in any game. Microsoft also went to a lot of trouble to make online playing a worthwhile aspect of the game, which it was not with CFS2 because of that title's vulnerability to cheating.

Lambasted for poor quality control, CFS3 is not a bad game. The biggest criticism I have is that a relative novice should not have to go to all this trouble to set it up and this is why I have marked it down. However, it is a very worthwhile title once properly installed and I have enjoyed playing it. It has become quite widely supported on the internet now which shows that there are plenty of people out there who have it running properly and have enough faith in it to develop it further. Those who give it only one star have a right to be disappointed but it would be grossly unfair to dismiss it out of hand.

Don't get this ... get one of the IL-2 games instead

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 10
Date: July 04, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Don't get this ... get one of the IL-2 games or all of them instead. Those are loads of fun and very realistic. This thing on the other hand is quirky and twitchy, and flat out butt ugly.
It may be technical accurate in many ways ... but things seem to happen for no reason, and it has no atmosphere at all. You are totally detached in this game, you don't feel like you are in it ever. Where as in any of the IL-2 games, you get sucked in right away.
Don't get this! I threw mine away!
Get the IL-2 games instead, they are cheep now days, they look good and are really lots of fun.

another thoroughbred from the Microsoft stable

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 10
Date: February 09, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Although there are a few glitches with some systems (a patch is due in February) this is a further joy if you liked CFS1 and CFS2. Be aware though that this is tactical air war, your job in this sim is to terrorize the ground. Dogfighting is still there but it is secondary to the main mission, destroying the enemy with tactical air support.

The aircraft are beautiful and the personalized nose art and squadron letters is a nice touch. Ground targets, pre and post destruction, are the best ever.

There are a few tantalizing too late in real life but intriguing historical planes such as the first jets. ONly the Me262 actually got into combat but the unbelievabley advanced Gotha jet is in here as well as the British Vampire and American P80. The sim allows you to try and find out 'what if' these aircraft had shown up a little sooner.

The CFS tactical display is still the best way to 'see' what's around you without a lot of view shifting and it's there again. CFS just gets better and better.

Another frustrating product from microsoft

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: October 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

My son bought this game and complained to me that it didn't seem to work right, he is 9. Well what can I say, as a linux user.

First, this game does not adhere to the system requirements that are listed on the box...! In fact, after installing all the fixes it comes nowhere near MS's early FS games.

Second, I suspect it has serious memory leaks in it which cause your virtual memory to sky rocket after a few missions and hours of play. You have to shut everything down on your computer if you run XP.

Third, I have witness my son pitching his aircraft into a dive and the plane goes straight down from 5K feet into the ground even though he isn't going that fast and is pulling back on the stick.

Fourth, as with everything MS, it loads slow, goes from one part of the game to another slow, and learns slow.

The only good thing are the clouds and some of the musik, which never stops, probably intended for you to forget how slow the thing is running.

Another piece of MS crap! Don't waste your money like we did...

Accurate flight models, but less than stellar game play

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: February 08, 2003
Author: Amazon User

CFS: 3 should be a sweet game for those who appreciate realism. On my 2.5 Ghz Pentium 4, w/ 64 MB NVIDA, the scenery is dead on, the flight models are accurate, and when enemy fighters come on, one gets the felling they are right in the middle of a WW II fur ball.

That said, campaign mode totaly betrays the CFS: 3's virtues. You can't win. It's as if there is no correlation between what you do on the battlefield and the movement of the campaign. I've run missions where I destroyed not just my target, but several targets, and stayed in the air until all my AI wingmen have destroyed targets as well. No positive change in the battle whatever.

Microsoft says on its CFS: 3 website that it has fixes planned in the future, so if you are willing to be a paying beta tester, there are many virtues to the game, but as a complete experience, this game needs improvement.

Lighten up everyone...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: November 30, 2003
Author: Amazon User

After reading the reviews for MS-CFS3, the image that came to mind was the "Ishtar" or "Waterworld" of the gaming community. I recently bought CFS3, opting also for the MS Force Feedback Joystick, and I've been enjoying it thoroughly. I think the criticism is misdirected, in that the game is not easy to learn - it takes a bit of practice and experimenting to truly get the hang of it (by no means do I declare myself an expert yet). Simply changing plane types changes the reaction characteristics (which I find as a plus). If you're looking for an arcade-style, 2-minute learning curve requiring little or no advance skill - don't buy this game. If you want a flight simulator game that's challenging, realistic, entertaining, and most of all fun both single and multiplayer, buy this game. I find the graphics and detail excellent, and the realism shocking.

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