Lock On: Modern Air Combat

"Crash and Burn"

These are tough days for a flight simmer. Gone are days of truly great combat sims like Jane's F/A-18 and Microprose's Falcon 4.0. Want to play a good RPG on your PC? Run out to the store and get one; there are countless ones available for you. Want a First Person Shooter instead? Well, there's no force on earth that could keep you from finding one. If, on the other hand, you want to play a combat flight simulator with pretensions of realism, well, you could be waiting a long time.

Enter Lock On: Modern Air Combat (or LOMAC as it's more affectionately known), created by the Russian development studio Eagle Dynamics as the spiritual successor to the famous Flanker series of combat sims. At first, LOMAC looks like a godsend to the starving simmer. Six aircraft to choose from; the mighty F-15C Eagle, the Su-27 and a naval equivalent the Su-33, The A-10 Warthog with its 30mm Avenger cannon, the MiG-29 Fulcrum, and the old-but-effective Su-25 Frogfoot. LOMAC attempts to give you a taste of many different kinds of aerial warfare, from tank-busting in the A-10 to air superiority in the F-15. Sadly, it falls far short of this goal; attempting to please everyone but pleasing no one in the end.

One thing for sure, though; the game sure is pretty. All the aircraft have a high polygon count and are meticulously detailed, and even the non-flyable aircraft look great (the F/A-18, in particular, looks spectacular). The landscape is a well-detailed rendering of the Black Sea area, complete with tree-lined hills, the sprawling Caucasus Mountains, and numerous cities. The real graphical punch, however, comes with LOMAC's heavy use of pixel and vertex shaders. Set the water detail high enough, and you can see all seaborne objects accurately reflected in the waves. When flying above storm clouds, you can actually see the brief flashes of lightning through the cloud tops. Your plane's jet engines actually generate heat waves from their exhaust, and if you look through your canopy at the sun, you can see minute scratches appear in the Lexan glass. Everything about the game screams gorgeous, and it is, without a doubt, the best looking flight simulator on the market right now.

Such beauty, unfortunately, comes at a steep price. Lock On's graphical engine, while doling out oodles of eye candy, is seriously unoptimized, bringing even higher-end PCs to their knees. The box "recommends" a Pentium 4 2.0 GHz as the minimum CPU spec, but you'll need even more than that to produce acceptable framerates. Even then, the game jerks about as if it were having seizures, which all but kills the elusive "feel of flight." This might be the first game where 512 MB of RAM is not enough, as turning your head to look out the side of your cockpit results in your hard drive thrashing about and LOMAC stuttering horribly to load in the new scenery. I expected having to turn down the settings to get a good framerate, but ironically, almost none of the in-game graphics options seemed to affect framerates in the slightest. Bizarrely, the settings that DO affect game performance are unintuitively hidden away in config files that must be manually tweaked in a text editor. Furthermore, one has to go through such convoluted steps such as running the DirectX Diagnostic tool and turning off hardware acceleration so that Lock On won't use CPU-intensive 3D audio. As if the poor framerates and the lack of in-game options weren't insulting enough, Lock On does not make any provisions for those who don't possess pixel and vertex shader-capable graphics cards. This is something that even cutting edge games like Doom 3 offer, but if you want to play Lock On with such a card, then you are, quite frankly, SOL. It will run, but you can look forward to graphical errors and frequent crashing.

The sound in LOMAC is another irritation. For some reason, your plane's engine sound is the exact same both in the cockpit and external views, meaning you're constantly subjected to the roar of your jet engines throughout the mission. Radio chatter sounds good, being in both English and Russian, but there's a distinct lack of it during missions; compare this to Jane's F/A-18 or Falcon 4.0 where the skies were alive with radio chatter that made you feel like a part of something bigger. The missions in Lock On feels as if they are taking place in the combat equivalent of a ghost town.

Having not flown any of the aircraft modelled in LOMAC, I can't say with any certainty how realistic the flight models are, save for the fact that they "feel right." While the physics modelling is acceptable, the avionics, however, are quite a few notches lower in fidelity. LOMAC tries to please both the hardcore and novice simmers at the same time, which results in the avionics occupying an unsatisfying middle ground. The radar, in particular, is much simplified, particularly in the Russian aircraft where it is missing the highly useful Track While Scan mode altogether. If you were weaned on Falcon 4.0's or Jane's F/A-18's highly complex and detailed radar modelling, you'll be in for a disappointment in Lock On.

Part of the problem is that LOMAC does not feature any clickable cockpits; something that sims as old as Jane's F-15 have offered. This means you'll be forced to memorize arcane keystrokes for just about all avionics devices, which wouldn't be so bad if commands were not so illogically mapped by default. "D" cycles weapons, "I" switches the radar on and off and "P" releases the drogue chute, as an example, causing you to waste time remapping the keys to the something more intuitive. Furthermore, for reasons beyond my comprehension, both the "launch weapons" and "fire the gun" inputs are one and the same. This might seem like a trivial thing, but other sims will allow me to bind the weapons launch button to the joystick pickle button, and the cannons to the trigger, so I can still fire my guns even with missiles cued up. In Lock On, however, if you have missiles selected, you must first switch back to guns, something that costs precious time in a close-quarters dogfight. Another sore spot is the tricky padlock view, which makes padlocking and un-padlocking threats a royal pain. All in all, LOMAC's interface is shoddy and poorly laid out, which makes the learning curve for those new to simulations much steeper than it need be.

There's also the matter of questionable weapon effectiveness. Given that detailed weapons information is undoubtedly highly classified, it's rather difficult to say anything with certainty, but the behavior of LOMAC is so out of whack it's hard to accept their behavior as anything close to "realistic." The AIM-120 AMRAAMs, supposedly the most advanced air-to-air missiles in the world, fizzle out far too frequently even when fired from the "no-escape" zone, are so pathetically useless at tracking their targets that it would be more effective if they were tipped with spring-loaded boxing gloves. The mighty Aegis cruisers are so utterly impotent at area defense that Russian aircraft can buzz them with nigh-impunity, while the Russian naval units can knock you out the sky like no one's business. There's a distinct pro-Russian bias to the effectiveness of each weapon and platform, and I can't help but wonder if its presence is more than accidental.

But the worst part of Lock On: Modern Air Combat, by far, is the so-called "Campaign." Veteran flight simmers will remember Falcon 4.0's magnificent dynamic campaign, where what you did in one mission had lasting consequences. Destroy a building and it would stay destroyed, at least until the enemy repaired it. If an incoming supply flight were destroyed, you would have to deal with a reduced inventory of weapons for your aircraft loadouts. Or, for another example, Jane's F/A-18, which while not possessing a totally dynamic campaign, featured one with an extensive branching structure, complete with CNN-style FMV cutscenes that truly made the whole deal seem real. But if you were expecting any of those things in LOMAC, you'll be in for a terrible disappointment. Lock On's campaign is purely static. That's right, it's a throwback to bad old days where failing a mission means repeating it ad nauseum until you get it right. Frankly, this gets old, fast, and it doesn't help that the campaigns themselves are sterile and dull. There's very little here for the seasoned simmer to sink their teeth into, and while user-created missions could spice things up a little, they are do little to compensate for the utter lack of a satisfying campaign mode. Given the lengthy time that LOMAC spent in development, the pathetic example of a "campaign" we're presented with is more than a little insulting.

Another area in which LOMAC fails miserably is in proper documentation. I'm sure you're all sick of my comparisons to Falcon 4.0 by now, but most flight simmers will fondly remember that game's 200+ page binder that thoroughly explained everything basic flight maneuvers to the intricacies of the various avionics packages. Lock On, on the other hand, comes with a tiny, console game-esque manual that's mostly devoted to the Mission Editor. The actual manual is an Adobe PDF file on the disk, but even that is poorly written and contains several glaring inaccuracies, given that much of the information was copied from the Flanker 2.5 manual. If you want a manual for LOMAC that you can actually hold in your hands, you have to pay extra. As if that weren't bad enough, Lock On was supposed to ship with a series of keycards to show the default key mappings, but they were MIA from a large amount of initially released copies of the game. Flight simulators, especially ones with "hardcore" pretensions need extensive documentation; a sloppily put together PDF file on the CD doesn't cut it.

LOMAC is also quite buggy and unstable. Crashes to desktop were frequent, and several times throughout the game, my aircraft's controls would suddenly decide to seize up only move about a quarter of their travel, making flight nearly impossible. As well, the game box might claim that LOMAC will run on Windows 98, but that's an outright lie. The quality of software overall is highly suspect, and everything about the game screams unfinished. LOMAC reeks of games like Silent Hunter II and Destroyer Command, two other Ubisoft-published that were pushed out of the door in flagrantly unfinished states. How ironic, then, that Ubisoft also released the magnificent IL-2 Sturmovik series, a fine example that detailed military flight sims are not dead.

Lock On: Modern Air Combat, however, simply disappoints. The graphics may be pretty, and with more time could have been classic, but the lack of a decent campaign, followed by the ludicrous system requirements and buggy code mean that LOMAC will quickly be forgotten. In the world of flight sims, it's nothing but a pretty picture hanging on the wall.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 02/22/05