Great linear action game, decent plot worth playing through, difficult but not punishing by default. I spent a few days playing though on normal difficulty, start to finish. Blends into the Warhammer 40k world pretty well. Doesn't require you get too cheesy to survive at the end, though weapon selection is a bit of a gamble, picking a long range weapon then finding out you needed a short range for the next section is a bit of an annoyance, but all it means is the next section is a little harder. Keyboard and mouse controls work fine and don't get in the way. At the price it's a great game to play through.
This is a pretty decent arcade to moderate realism flight game. It has two problems - 1. It doesn't know if it wants to be an arcade game or a sim. It's ported from an console game, but you can fly it with a "realistic" mode and it's only a bit less realistic than a game like il2. But the missions are crafted more towards arcade more. 2. You have to progress through the missions linearly, and some of them have issues. One is basically unfinishable in arcade mode, one will randomly have the scripting break and just stop giving you objectives but never finish. The graphics are nice, you can fly full HOTAS or you can fly with a gamepad or mouse, and it's pretty accessible and runs smooth and well. It's just got some frustrations because it's not quite a game, not quite a flight sim, and will break your flow by you needing to work around issues to play the full 15 mission campaign. For the sales price you'll get your money's worth.
I have it running fine in 2024 on Windows 11. Clearly YMMV but it is working for me. Some slight graphics glitches and OpenGL doesn't work any more, but otherwise golden. I got around the annoying HOTAS IDs shifting by using Vjoy and Joystick Gremlin to rebind my devices to a single virtual joystick, and set keystrokes instead of using the ingame control configuration. If you have a webcam, take the trouble to install Opentrack and get that configured, just using the built in Neuralnet tracker with 2 axis enabled only works perfect for me. Head tracking improves the gameplay by heaps, you can keep your eyes where you want them. Single player is plenty of fun, there are countless planes and campaigns, not as detailed as e.g IL2 Battle of Stalingrad but the gameplay is about as good. If you want to play the campaign you're looking at playing about 30 minutes per mission where you might shoot down two planes if you are lucky, or survive destroying a couple of ground targets. It is not as involved as DCS, you can turn off complex engine management (I do) and fly with relatively simple controls. I wish they would modernise the UI and do some QOL stuff to fix basic graphics glitches and the keybinding UI, the game itself is great, runs incredibly smooth and has more content than you'll ever get through!
I've played Far Cry 2 through 5, and this is the only one I come back to. It's harder, it's a more consistent experience, and it's much less "gamey". All the subsequent Far Cry games have an inverted difficulty curve. They start out pretty normal, then by the end when you've "skilled up" and got all the best weapons, you can't be stopped. FC2 gets harder no matter what gear you get. If you don't actually enjoy the gunplay, run and gun, fight your way across the map experience, this is not for you. The map never becomes safe. All patrols and checkpoints constantly respawn and are constantly hostile. Traversing the map is part of the game and it only gets harder. You need a car to cross areas, and you have to fight, stealth or try to race through - but the AI is hard and aggressive, they will pursue you, flank you, shoot mortars at you, snipe you, set fire to the building you are in... Weapons degrade, especially if you take them swimming. Then they jam at inconvenient times. This applies to all weapons taken from enemies. This mechanic completely disappears in later games, but it changes the game a lot. You can do missions and pay to get access to decent weapons, but you can grab a launcher or sniper rifle early on and it's pretty good. The plot is OK and the setting is great. So in theory you're dropped in to do an assassination of an arms dealer, but you get drawn into the conflict. You don't join a side, you're an interloper, everyone shoots at you. You have to do some good things, but only because you need malaria medication. Every other thing you do just makes things worse. There's other mercenaries who you can work with, and who can save you from death - every character you don't play, you will instead see in game - and they can die in missions or when saving you. Basically it comes down to this - Do you actually enjoy the combat and exploration of a Far Cry game? If so, this has the most of it. If instead you like the RPG elements, not for you.
Looks great, has a good variety of aircraft that are distinct in loadout and handling, constantly target rich environment. Explosions everywhere. Smoke trails, missiles, tracers. The controls are well thought out, gamepad worked perfectly straight away. Views, targetting etc are all simple. It's samey in the sense that every mission involves destroying a list of targets, but that's the gameplay right, that's what you're here for. It's plenty of fun. I went through the campaign start to finish in 3 sittings and I'll probably play it again. Missions are fairly long but I could always do another one. Next time I'll use different planes. If you want to feel like a top gun, zooming around and blowing stuff up, this is your game.
