Dogfight: 80 Years of Aerial Warfare
| Developer: MicroProse | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: MicroProse | Sound: |
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| Year: 1993 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Flight simulation | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
6/10 | |
When specialists of overly complex simulation try their hand at arcade gaming, they start by doing what they know best: a realistic simulator packed with features. Then, they grab an axe and start hacking away at anything that sticks out. Every parameter that might annoy the casual player (like me), who craves immediate and mindless action. So, chlak! the takeoff, chlak! the landing, the navigation, and the slew of keyboard shortcuts.
The problem is, what you end up with is the mutilated trunk of a flight simulator, beautifully dressed up, but as boring as watching paint dry. Yeah, making a brainless game requires skill too…
The premise is this: you choose a fighter jet from twelve (from different eras) and engage in machine-gun dogfights, or for the more daring, skirmishes against multiple enemies controlled by the computer (up to five). On paper, tempting. In practice, you’re stuck flying in circles, hunting down your opponent, who’s reduced to a single pixel, and doing the same thing. You circle and circle, over a flat and monochrome landscape; an endless dance, without a runway, without an audience, and without music.
They tried to spice things up by adding various historical scenarios, but it falls back into the traps of traditional simulations that require a manual and a functioning brain. No thanks!
To finish off the poor thing, despite its technical and graphical simplicity, the game suffers from an inexplicable slowness and far too many loading times (to fix the disk-swapping issue, install it on a hard drive).
Note that chlak! the multiplayer mode, present in the original PC version, was cut from the Amiga port. Many animations were also lost.
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