User Reviews (1 - 11 of 37)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

Looks good, plays terrible

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: January 27, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I purchased this game even after reading about all the bugs and crashes, hoping that somewhere under all the problems I could find the great sim that Microprose advertised. Big mistake. Even with the lates 1.08 patch, this game crashes to the desktop about half the time. It seems there is a hardware conflict with just about every device known. And even a PIII 450 with 96RAM and a Viper 550 card can't keep up with frame rates in campaign mode, even with graphics set at medium-it's more like watching a slide show. The real problem is that even after patching, getting the update for the patch, reading the confusing manual cover to cover several times, flying the lame training missions (you'll have to read the instructions for each mission as you fly, as there is no on screen directions), and spending endless hours "mastering" the avionics and weapons systems, the game is still not only frustrating, but borders on unplayable. Communications will instruct you to attack and enemy, give you a range and bearing, but the enemy will not be there. And when an enemy is right behind you? The tower will tell you the "picture is clear". I spent days just trying to find out what I was supposed to be TRYING to do. Oh yeah, and if you choose to use the new patch to fix some of the bugs (plenty still exist), you will not have force feedback at all. I'll admit, the graphics are great, the manual looks good, but when you consider that Hasbro aquired Microprose and forced them to release the product in an unfinished state, it makes you wonder why you should be paying to test what is really a beta version product.

Not up to today's standards

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 14
Date: June 28, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Compared to other simulations that were on the market when Falcon came out, this game truely did not measure up. Especially after Jane's F/A-18. It was and still is buggy and slow running. Look at F/A-18, which runs beautifully and has crashed maybe once on me. Even Jane's F-15 with its older graphics is better and less buggy. Instead of this game, look into spending your money elsewhere...on something like Jane's F/A-18, or F-15.

Falcon 4.0

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: November 30, 1999
Author: Amazon User

This game is very impressive at first sight featuring stunning graphics and realistic gameplay. However, the campaign is full of bugs and almost impossible to really play. Microprose has put out patches but they haven't fixed anything. This is a cool game, but it needs some work

Flawed perfection

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: January 19, 2000
Author: Amazon User

First off get the current patch (1.08). Without it Falcon 4 is a buggy dung heap. Second the system requirements are too low. Start with the "HOT" system. Anything less will be anticlimactic. Patched and running on a HOT system, Falcon 4 is the beautiful, challenging, and exhilerating. At max resolution it is stunning.

The training engagements should be considered a requirement; the SAMs are deadly, the enemy aircraft intelligent, and the flight model is unforgiving. I have yet to be able to use the most realistic avionic settings; Some day. This is a fantastic example of a pure hardcore flightsim. I love the challenge. This one has finally pushed EF2000 off my hard drive.

By the way I would have given the game 5 stars if it had been released in its current patched version. It's a shame we wind up doing playtesting for companies.

falcon 4.0

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: December 04, 1999
Author: Amazon User

overall, this is a great sim, but with alot of things that need to be aware of. first off, u cant just fire it up and expect to wack a bogey. with as much detail to realism that there is, this is no ordinary flight sim. as in a real f-16, certain controls work certain functions. u cant use ground radar to target aircraft and vice versa. u must set down and thoroughly read and re-read the book just to even figure out part of all the functions on this bird. u need to bring up the ground radar, target a building, then figure out how to arm the bombs or mavericks...no book? uh oh, have fun figurin it out. other issues: u MUST have a minumum of a 16 meg video card with this game. 8 megs might run it, but may be choppy. missions tend to load up slow. instead of helping u learn how to arm weapons and set up a shot, the training missions dont help u out at all. PLUS'es: beautiful graphics, crisp handling, and great detail. bummer's: gotta have a pretty heavy duty video card, and u need to read the manual for about a month or two to figure out what u are doing

Not worth the headache

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 17
Date: March 05, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I have a Falcon 4 since it's release, and used a numerous patches with various results. My final opinion: look elsewhere...

This game is nice when it works; unfortunately for me, it will crash quite often, and usually in the most inappropriate moments /like when you have the enemy locked, before landing, etc/. problem is that it takes a very long time from launching the game into the firing position. After a few reboots and hours of "playing", I'm finding myself to have fun maybe 10 minutes. The rest of the time I'm loading or rebooting.

I used all available patches and tried 3 different videocards /Voodoo2's in SLI, Viper 550 and 3D Prophet/; remember that one of the early patches actually worked quite well...but other things were flawed.

This game has a problem with bugs, and will probably never be fixed enough to run on every system. Maybe is's too complicated for today's systems, who knows.

Demands on system are very high, particularly in the campaign mode /main part of the game/, which really needs a major CPU power. Even to load a single missions takes forever. Tried multiplayer a few times as well, game kept crashing.

Maybe it is possible to fine tune the game&system in order to minimize the crashes, but I'm giving up /don't have really the time and patience for those tweaks and believe that to have the latest drivers for everything should be normally sufficient for every game, don't have usually problems with any game which I couldn't fix within a couple of minutes/.

Run on PII400/128MB, 3D Prophet 32MB DDR video /3.68reference nVidia driver/, SB AWE64 sound, Win98 SE and DirectX7 .

So-so game.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: June 10, 2000
Author: Amazon User

For those of you wanting a good Flight sim. Turn to Jane's.

I am a Hardcore Flight Simmer. Flight Sims even convienced me to join the NAVY AVIATION. But this game's graphics are rather sad. I mean I have a serous system 600MHZ P3, 128MB ram, 32MB VideoRAM Nvida GeForce card. Well enough about my system. Back to the game. The Flight modeling is good but the Game in the nicest way possible Sucks. Spend your money on F/A-18, Usaf, or Flanker 2.0 if you are a hardcore flight simmer looking for a new game for the arsenal. Take my Military Honor on it.

1+ years old and still the best sim out there...............

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 10
Date: February 06, 2000
Author: Amazon User

OK, you definitely need to patch this puppy to the 1.08 version when you install it. But it still reeks of realism, it's something you're not going to be bored of in a couple of months. I still don't feel like I have complete mastery of the sim yet. Time after time, I am humbled by this game. And,as with every undertaking of this magnitude, it's always not going to have 100% stability or the gameplay may fall short of perfection. My hope is that Microprose/Hasbro will continually support this game for the years to come. It could be just that great in a couple more revisions! At less than $20, it's really a steal. The sims coming out right now (like Jane's F/A-18) are not even close to Falcon 4.0 at revision 1.08. Caution: people with no patience for a big learning curve should steer clear of this game. The manual is over 400 pages! You're not going to be an ace within a couple of weeks. Frustration and death are going to be the norms when you are just getting into the pilot's seat!

Don't bail-out of Falcon 4.0 just yet.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: January 12, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This extremely comprehensive and demanding flight-sim appeared back in about 2000 and, after release looked like it was in trouble. Despite the hype (a lot of it deserved), Falcon4 (or "F4") was dogged by both huge system requirements and numerous bugs. Based on the F-16 (and following a string of hardcore sims going back to the original Falcon of 1987!), "F4" had been awaited breathlessly by fans, and arrived with numerous bugs. MPS, F4's publisher suddenly announced that they were dropping the sim, paving the way for F4's nearest competitor, "Jane's F/A-18" to become the top game for fans of highly detailed and demanding ("hardcore") flight-sims. By 2002, with the stream of flight-sims having stagnated, a 3-year old sim still has much to offer - but the sim to beat isn't necessarily "F/A-18" (a great sim to be sure) but F4, rescued and brought to beautiful useability by a legion of on-line sim-fanatics. Having gained access to F4's source-code, these fans have crafted their own software called "Service Packs" which partly patch but mostly expand the original game. I'll keep this review confined to the original, though. In short - F4 still has much to offer.

F4 is focused on the F-16, the USAF's premiere multi-role fighter. Not an original concept (you can fly the "Viper" in campaigns, single missions and "instant action") but F4 never lets you forget that the proof is in the execution. The flight model is demanding: slippery along each of the major directional axes and, for a light fighter, can lose energy and get heavy really quick. The avionics are also comprehensive - think that "multi-mode radar" means "air-to-air" and "air-to-ground"? Here, you'll be fiddling with modes even in "pure" situations (in which you'll be either primed for counter-air or ground-strike missions) learning the nuances of "range-while-search" or "track-while-search" modes while hunting MiGs. The range of weapons is wider than on older games - echoing the F-16's maturation from a small jet that could only fight with iron-dumb bombs and short range missiles like the Sidewinder to a more complex machine geared for "smart" bombs, anti-radiation missiles and AMRAAM in night or adverse weather. The enemies aren't slouches either (although that may have much to do with my failure to master this sim).

F4's campaign is set in a futuristic North Korea (making it more topical than "Jane's F/A-18" which has you flying off Russia's arctic frontier). An elaborate setup menu allows you to tailor realism and controllability. My Thrustmater WCS/FCS setup was recognized here as quickly as on "Jane's F/A-18" (unsurprising since they both have to run through Windows's control panel - but thank heaven for small miracles nonetheless) though F4's key-mapping editor seems more stubborn than that of the other game. While the game ran well normally using my GeForce3 card, the menu appears to offer support only for 3DFx cards and not OpenGL, the API for that GeForce graphics-acceleration. Unfortunately, F4 was one of those great games that appeared immediately before the end of 3dFx's reign as the king of graphics acceleration. Not only is 3DFx a thing of the past, but "Glide", the 3DFx API isn't supported by newer operating systems like WinXP. Like "Flanker 2.5", you can play Glide-supported games on your OpenGL system and still appreciate how far ahead of their time they were, but - stuck in software-only mode - never forgetting how long ago that time was. Sound was also an issue - with the sim modeling a great range of sounds (from the screams and roars of your engine down to the distinctive howls, clicks and whistles of each type's fire-control radar), but also suffering a lot of stuttering. Attention to detail is magnificent. Control surfaces and engine nozzles are convincingly animated and the F-16's trademark shoulder vortices appear in high-speed climbs. You can even customize the skins on both your airplane and those of your enemies. I gave mine the Israeli-style camo paint job that appeared in the "Iron Eagle" movies (now there's an idea for a sim, certainly one that can't be more unrealistic than the flick it was based on). The beauty is that, while F4 remains cutting edge by virtue of how far ahead of its time it was (and how few new sims have come to the market since then), the faster computers that can run F4 more comfortably are cheaper and more widely available.

SYSTEM ISSUES: I "flew" my F4 on a Pentium4 running at 4Ghz. XP accepted this sim out of the box (something else that "Jane's F/A-18" couldn't quite claim). Performance was largely smooth but became noticeably choppy at times even on simple "instant action" flights. In more elaborate game play - especially during dynamic campaigns - F4 reveals itself an incredible hog for just about every resource your computer has: the CPU, main memory, graphics memory etc. Worse, F4 suffers an acute "memory leakage" problem: as you'd expect, it takes a lot of RAM to "create" each of those enemy tanks and soldiers and endow them with AI (but not so much that they don't just turn north and run for cover), but the program doesn't de-allocate or give that RAM back as quickly as it takes it away, which means that your campaigns will bog down really quickly.

In short - if you want a truly hardcore sim, one that will make you forget your machine's obsolescence, consider what your system offers but also remain informed about what each sim's fan-base offers. With tech support becoming less supportive for such games, F4 and its competitors from 1999 will always rely on the perseverance of fans to adress their flaws. For either Jane's or F4 you'll need a machine with an even 1Ghz of processing muscle. OpenGL owners should consider F/A-18 (again - no slouch), but those owning late-generation graphics cards based on 3DFx's "Voodoo" technology should get F4.

For those who want real without enlisting

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: December 21, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This is the best combat simulator I have ever used. I will not bore you with the details (you can get that from other reviews). It is a shame however that Microprose rushed the release of Falcon 4 without adequate testing. It is even more tragic that no other project from Microprose is to be released. Users must rely on 3rd party patches and addons. Why, because the true power is in its untapped potential: the electronic battlefield. In Falcon 3 you had the F-18 and the Mig29 complementing and opposing the F-16. I am hopefull that one day other aircraft will be integrated making the air campaign that much more dynamic. I am a pilot myself flying in the military and I recall the feeling of dread and fascination of formation flying, well I felt it in Falcon 4, especially the air to air refuelling(at real settings). You can plan,fly and fight with your friends. For people who want authenticity are not afraid of a learning curve and for pure satisfaction this sim is for you.

Review Page: 1 2 3 4 Next 

Actions