Falcon Collection

Falcon 4.0 is one of the best sims of all time. I've put more than 500 hours and made a bunch of friends in the community. Greatest sim ever!

It's great to have access to the old games but mostly this collection is also a pre-requisite to being able to install Falcon BMS which is the nonplusultra benchmark for a realistic Fighter Pilot simulation. Other sims may have fancier graphcis but they pale in scope and realism compared to BMS. Incredibly this sim built up from the sourcecode of Falcon 4.0 trumps anything else out there in terms of flight model physics, weapons simulations and artificial intelligence. Don't miss out!

Okay - I never played much of the first two, but Falcon 3.0 and Falcon 4.0 I played EXTENSIVELY. Falcon 4.0, if you download the latest fan-made Falcon BMS update, is still pretty amazing. It comes down to the dynamic campaigns in both games. Both were a major source of bugs at the time of their original release, but you effectively have an AI-driven Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game going on "under the hood." You only have control over your own squadron, but even at that level you can have a great deal of control over how things play out. In Falcon 4.0, you can even ignore the AI-assigned missions and just create your own, whether you personally fly them or not. At the highest campaign difficulty, your only hope may be to bomb the bridges, forcing the AI to slow its advance to give your own forces a chance to marshal and regroup (and gain desperately needed supplies). If you bomb an airbase near your front lines, the enemy may be forced to use more distant airfields while it makes repairs (which may increase its response times). When it all works, it's pretty amazing. Until DCS adds an F-16 module, this remains the most hard-core and accurate F-16 simulation in the consumer space. And even Falcon 3.0, with its barely-VGA graphics, is a pretty solid flight sim with some great tools and a lot of fun to be had.

I had the falcon series back in the day, and while the graphics are dated, the "Art of the Kill" pdf included is worth the price. It is the best presentation of air combat tactics and moves. If you play any combat sim, this little book will make you a much better combat pilot. It teaches thinks like convergence, turning cones, how to conserve speed and how to bleed it off, boom and zoom, scissors and other ways to get someone off your tail on into your sights.

Falcon 4.0 with added BMS 4.33 is the best modern fighter jet sim ever made and it comes down to two things: After all these years, no other sim has come close to the immersion of being a fighter pilot in an ever-changing dynamic campaign, where you see this coordination of different flights and ground forces trying to achieve victory. Mission generator gives you different missions all the time, there's no repetition here. Different weather, time of day, flight plan, targets and opponents all provide different experience every time, with the end goal to defeat North Korea. You see planes taking off when you prepare for takeoff, you meet returning flights whey you fly to your target, which provides you with unbeatable cog-in-a-war-machine felling and immersion. Second part comes to the most complete and accurate simulation of many blocks of the F-16 fighter jet, which is still one of the best planes ever made. Everything from first iteration to the latest block 50-52 is available and because it's a multi-role fighter, you get to fly all kinds of interesting missions. Air-to air combat, air-to-ground attacks and destruction of enemy air defenses in day, night and any weather, requires a lot of knowledge about the jet itself, radar, avionics and how to effectively deploy all kinds of weapons available for many types of missions. Once you get over the training missions and know how to use this plane as a weapon, it's where the fun only begins.