Any one got this flight sim? How does it compare to Lock on FC2?
Is there something better than both of these?

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres ... &biw=1280&bih=834

Sadly Falcon 4.0 is still king of the hill of the hardcore modern flight sim with dynamic campaigns. Good news is it still rocks.

F4AF has one of the best avionics model I've seen in a sim. I guess that DCS: Black Shark can beat it, but Ka-50 certainly doesn't have that much of computerized equipment as F-16A MLU does, so the devs at Eagle Dynamics had a bit easier task.
F4AF also has a pretty good campaign mode. There are no missions "blow up this, shoot down that" but constantly developing battle environment that runs in real time and changes constantly. If you destroy a bridge, it will remains destroyed with all the excepted effects. If you bomb a runway on an airfield, you can be sure no enemy fighters will scramble to intercept you from there till it's repaired.
It's seriously lacking in terms of flight model. For the first time I thought it was the FLCS, but then I realized how canned the flight model actually is. If you enjoy dogfighting and other fancy flying stuff, you're likely to be disappointed.
The AI could also use some improvement and even the crappy AI seen in LockOn: FC is better.

F4AF is not a bad sim, what really elevates it above the others is the campaign mode which makes the whole battefield seem to be "alive". Seriously, there is no other sim where a couple of Mig-29's appearing on a radar scope while nearing Mostar really scares the hell out of me...

I haven't tried FC2 yet, mainly because of the goddamn StarForce. But if I'm not mistaken they've just patched the old FC with the DCS:BS updated engine (which fixes few graphics bugs and somewhat increases performance), made AI planes use an actual flight model and fixed few glitches community has been reporting (and partially workarounding) for a few years.
All in all, they've done no real work (every improvement they FC2 has was available already, they've just merged it together) and now they're asking real money for this. As much as I loved Flanker 2 and LockOn, I'll wait till FighterOps makes it's way to the shops

<offtopic>
There have been a lot of "LFS needs DX10" threads appearing lately. LockOn and BS is a perfect example of how using a newer version of DX API doesn't change the appearance of the game at all. BS has a reworked engine which utilizes DX9 instead of DX8 to fix few graphics glitches. Now look and the screenshots and report if you can tell the difference
</offtopic>

Thanks for the feedback. I was recomeneded Black Shark but im not into flight sims enough to blow $40 on it.
So you are saying Falcon is good but for dogfighting Lockon FC2 is a better bet?

Quote from anttt69 :

Thanks for the feedback. I was recomeneded Black Shark but im not into flight sims enough to blow $40 on it.
So you are saying Falcon is good but for dogfighting Lockon FC2 is a better bet?

Hey Ant, let me know how this works out for you as I am looking for much the same thing.

AAnt

Quote from anttt69 :

Thanks for the feedback. I was recomeneded Black Shark but im not into flight sims enough to blow $40 on it.
So you are saying Falcon is good but for dogfighting Lockon FC2 is a better bet?

If you're looking for some quick but still pretty realistic action, FC2 is probably the way to go. It features a wider variety of airplanes and quite good flight model (Su-25 and 25T even feature so-called Advanced Flight Model which is just awesome) but the overall detailedness of the simulation is considerably lower than in F4AF. (Pressing two buttons is all it takes to do a cold start of an aircraft in FC, you need several minutes to cold start an F-16 in F4AF even if you learn all the steps by heart).
If you enjoy studying the thick flight manual, learning about all the radar modes and weapon delivery operations and feel that indescribable pleasure once you master the night bombing with LANTRIN, F4AF is what you've been looking for

BTW, if you aren't really a hardcore sims fan, perhaps a F-22 TAW might interest you. It doesn't even try to be a hardcore sim but it's still a great fun. In some respects it's even better than a lot of elite sims. What I personally loved about it was the damage model.