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Pretty sad that this is the best flight sim on the market

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 18 / 54
Date: November 25, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Don't believe the hype. This game is all graphics and no substance. For a company that claims to make super-realistic flight sims Maddox Games does a really poor job. This is basically an arcade flight game with super-realistic graphics. The campaign is clunky and inflexible; the damage models are so poor that it's easy for even a complete novice to shoot down enemy planes; and the FM in Pacific Fighters is poor even by Maddox standards. Not only are these things poorly-done, but Maddox doesn't allow any mods for damage, so it's not even possible for the community to fix this aspect. All-in-all, a terrible sim. The 10 year-old Aces of the Pacific, although graphically inferior, was much more fun than this lemon.

Maddox has made its name for years by over-hyping their pretty yet shoddy products. It's about time someone came along to make a real simulation. Sadly, Maddox is currently the only game in town, which just shows the sad state of the simulation genre. If only Dynamix was still around to show Maddox what a good simulation looks like.

1 star for graphics. As usual with Maddox titles, awful gameplay, poor realism, and no ability to mod the game's interior workings make this game a big disappointment.

Pathetic

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 18 / 30
Date: May 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

My issues with IL-2 Sturmovik include taildragger taxiing (they taxi exactly like a tricycle in the game), no groundloops, no roll inertia at all, scripted spins ("Oleg's Banana Peel Stall" and automatic spins even when plane has no torque and stalls are perfectly coordinated), no difference in dive acceleration between planes, hugely incorrect torque (no rudder input necessary, torque affects twin engined planes with contra-rotating propellers, torque present with engine off), Russian differential braking system on all Western planes (especially annoying for someone who is accustomed to the real thing), and incredibly simple "realistic" engine management (they even took out the P-40's mixture control in one of the patches; don't ask me why, because you can see the control right there in the cockpit).

Here's a few other things I've noticed. You can keep flying a constant circle at very low speed while your wingtip is touching the ground, when in real life you'd be cartwheeling. If you touch wings with another aircraft in the air or on the ground, you lose your wing no matter how gently you touch. So much for the historical tactic of wingtipping V-2 rockets (something the game manual claims you can do). If you are out of fuel and ammunition and you hit the ground hard, you still detonate - what? You can drop a five thousand pound bomb two feet away from a tank, and it won't hurt it because you didn't hit it. You can tear about the sky on full throttle all day, and when you start to overheat, just pull back the throttle for a few seconds, and hey presto - you're good to go again. And don't get me started on the fifty caliber issue. In addition, none of the planes behave like a real aircraft. I can only go with my instinct, observations of warbirds, and limited experience with Cessnas on that one.

My single largest issue is the fact that there are no stalls in the game, discounting spins. You cannot stall your aircraft. You can spin it, but you can't stall it. That's one of the most important parts of flying, and it's done completely wrong.

And I haven't even mentioned the incorrect individual aircraft peformance specifications and characteristics.

Unfinished release, wait for the finished product

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 25
Date: February 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

They made their release deadline, but at what cost?

You have to get a patch just to get started, then some of the area maps are missing, {how can you attack Pearl Harbor when it's not there?}, some aircraft they said you could fly,... well... you can't, and the patches are already up to 3.4 and megabytes of fixes...... maybe they'll come out with the finished version sometime.... otherwise buy it for $0.01 and find patches online, just to see the intro!

a waste of time

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 26
Date: April 19, 2006
Author: Amazon User

this is probably the second worst flight simulator ever designed. Beaufighters and a-20's fly into mountains, the USMC on Guadalcanal fly P-39's and later P-47's. You can fly corsairs and hellcats, but only to practice carrier take-offs and landings... In general, this game is a waste of time if you want any sort of historical accuracy or playability.

Hopelessly incomplete

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 14
Date: September 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

OK, I've waited until patch after patch, listened to the people saying that 1C gives more than expected in continued product support, but now I have to rate this.

Pacific fighters is exactly what one expects ,, simply an add-on for their russian front game. It adds "Pacific fighters" to the eastern front struggle, with the added bonus of limited carrier operations.

That is also what's wrong with this product. Advertised as a stand alone game, it doesn't have the aircraft, ships, or terrain to recreate even a single battle historically. Pearl Harbor is "simulated" by using british or russian battleships, anchored along aan "Oahu" with no diamond head, but you can't fly a Kate against them, in fact, you can't fly any carrier based torpedo planes! I'm not talking about just missing sub-types either, although those exist (F4F-3A?), but where are the late war japanese strike planes? Or the SB2C, the major dive bomber of the last two years? What about the TBD's at Midway? It can't be simulated, they don't exist, and neither do three of four kido butai carriers! As for ships, probably the critical aspect to simulating any pacific theater combat, you get an essex, a repainted essex, a pre-war Lexington, a cheesy knock off Saratoga, in an incorrect configuration for any period, and an escort carrier in two paint schemes. Missing are all US battleships, all but one US cruiser, and all japanese cruisers and battleships. Japanese carriers are shorted as well, with a zuikaku class, and an Akagi, that's it! How can you release a pacific theater game without the Enterprise? Really, who wouldn't notice?

Terrain is also poorly, almost insultingly done, no slot, no Phillipines, no Java area, and Oahu has already been covered as a poor representation.

On top of all that is missing, one must wonder about the vaunted flight modeling, when an A6M2 zero outruns an F6F-5 in level flight. Radial engine planes suffer catastrophic engine damage, while the inlines seem invulnerable.

Also completely missing is weather. Oh, be sure, you can select varying levels of single layer cloud cover, but wind makes an appearance in only the heaviest overcast, and only as some sort of turbulence factor, no where is it singly selectable, nor are speeds and directions at altitude configurable. That makes what few opportunities for carrier operations exist limited to the speed the ships can generate. I've heard the developers' sycophants tell me that "is plane game, not weather or ship game" but it still feels like a tank sim done in a parking lot. Add to that, the AI (which isn't very I) doesn't use the adverse effects of clouds and darkness, they have super-vision that sees through those.

I wonder if the combination of a russian developer, and a french distributor will ever make for good gameplay in a simulator focused on a singularly american theater.

I've had it, really, and if I could return this thing I would. Rest assured Maddox' games upcoming Battle of Britain won't be on my hard drive. If not for what will undoubtedly be poor execution and gameplay, then for the copy protection, that makes running the game a real gamble, and introduces the possibility of actually damaging your hardware..(google "Starforce", "Securom")

Pass it by.....unless you are one of the "Air Quake" sycophants that seem to rabidly enjoy this stuff....re-spawn indeed...

Let the buyer beware

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 13
Date: April 13, 2005
Author: Amazon User

My advice to anyone who is interested in buying this game is to wait until it hits the bargin rack. In my case the game refused to load, the program would not recognize either of the cds. The label states the game contains technology to prevent copying which may conflict with some drives. Believe it! The ubisoft support page requires you to provide lots of personal information in order to be told that the problem is with your computer, perish the thought that there would be anything wrong with their software.

Looks great on a high-end system...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 48
Date: May 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

And that's about it.

The package is a cash-cow for Russian developer 1C. It's only real use is to generate revenue to fund continued work on the phony-baloney notion that the Red Air Force destroyed the Luftwaffe in WW2.

Over half the planes in the game are either Italian, Russian or British. That's right, in a "simulation" titled, Pacific Fighters, over half the aircraft are associated with forces that had little or no involvement in the theatre.

The good news for aspiring Nazis is that the game can merged with previous 1C titles to create a cornucopia of swaztika-emblazoned aircraft. The bad news for the fascists is that the other half of the plane-set is Soviet, and they RULE the game.

Finally, it's not a "simulator" at all. There is no wind or other atmospheric effects. The beautifully done cockpits provide little information of practial use. In short, compared to FS2004, it's really kind of a joke, excepting again, to Soviet aviation revisionists or Hitler lovers.

Yuk!

5 stars for an unreleased game?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 33
Date: October 20, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I'm sure the game will be well done, but what do we gain from a 5 star rating for a game that isn't scheduled for release until late NOVEMBER. Please play it before you rate it.

Thank you

Game Won't Initialize

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 12
Date: June 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game because of the good reviews. It appeared to install OK, but when I tried to start the game, I got an error message saying "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000142)." I rebooted my computer twice, and reinstalled the game twice to no avail. I did a Google search on the error, and found that other people were reporting the same error in discussion groups. One person offered a solution that involved changing a video setting, and I tried that. Not only didn't it work, but I began getting Nvidia error messages unrelated to the game because of the settings I changed. I recommend avoiding Pacific Fighters until Microsoft makes a patch available.

Buy a better game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 14
Date: July 11, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I bought it because of the ratings, but it's not much better than Chuck Yeager's air combat.

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