F-16 Fighting Falcon - iF-16 Fighting Falcon

The light filters across the deserted airfield. The heat of the dawn casts long shadows across the Afgan desert. Your F-16, like a wild metallic stallion roars above the clouds. You look up at the unblemished sky, and down at the carpet of cloud below you. You turn to your GPS, and you see you are approaching your target. Like a starved seagull spotting a haddock, you dive beneath the cloud cover. Tracer fire pings past you. You have seconds before intercept fighters rip you apart. You see your target, and you grasp the sweat-stained joystick harder than ever before.

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It's moments like this that make F-16: Flying Falcon. The pulse-pounding moments of sheer panic as you turn on the afterburner to escape a missile flying straight at you. Tension taking you beyond breaking point as you look through the green-tainted windscreen at midnight, ground emplacements ready to blast you to bits while you glide thousands of feet above them, taking pictures of their position. The graphics truly are impressive, and they put you right in the action.
Anyone who actually flies planes will love this. Even those who simply enjoy flight simulators will see what a great job designers did with all those thousands of finicky controls you find in an airplane. If you see a button, switch, dial or knob in the well-rendered cockpit, it does something. No pretty but useless controls here.
But realism can mean problems. SERIOUS PROBLEMS. While you sit around, admiring the scenery and playing with the controls, enemy fighters strafe the runway and before you can hit that ignition switch, blip! Goodnight Vienna.
A learning curve? Sorry, not here. It's a few basic tutorials to set out what to do, and then you're in the manure at the deep end. Like most flight simulators, this one has a time warp function, so you don't have to sit around for an hour watching your pretty little plane flying from one end of the Middle East to the other. Sadly, this is little more than a gesture. Set it above 10x speed and your pilotless plane becomes a pilotless pile of garbage on the floor. So there you are, sat in front of your computer for hours on end holding the joystick steady.
And don't think it gets easy once you're at your destination. After what feels like an age trying to keep your metal capsule in the air, fighters from all directions close in and decimate you. Even if, by some miracle you manage to limp away, two minutes later a red light pops up. WARNING! FUEL LOW! You're miles from home, and there's no way you can land yourself. You need autoland! But, of course, it doesn't work away from the airfield. You have only one chance. You shut off power and try to glide home. Strange, the floor seems to be coming up fast! You turn the engine to maximum, but it's too late. Goodbye world.