Review by: Brian Clair
Published: January 1, 1997

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times – “Nothing good ever came from a Mac.” Well, A-10 Cuba! is the sequel to the Mac game A-10 Attack! and as it turns out, I’m partially right – but not because of the Mac comment (I think). As the name implies, A-10 Cuba! puts you into the cockpit of the famous tank killing Fairchild Warthog. Having seen what a real A-10 can do I quickly tore open the gods evil shrink wrap and installed this bad ass game onto my computer. Needless to say, the trouble started just as soon as I was done but we’ll get to that later…

A-10 Cuba! has been touted to contain “unparalleled flight realism” and it certainly does in most areas! The game uses an advanced physics model to simulate just about every aspect of a real Warthog. What’s more is that the game doesn’t take your hand and do things for you – you have to taxi to the runway, take off, land, find your way to objectives, etc. By far this is more of a military flight simulator than any kind of pansy flying game. Not only does this get you confused as hell but quickly gives you an idea of how difficult the real A-10 must be to fly.

The game comes with several tutorial missions to help “teach” you how to take off, land, etc. Once you’ve managed to succeed at these, you can launch on the various missions in the game over Cuba. The nice thing about this game is how much detail has been put into your A-10. Just about every dial and jet fighter element is in the game from the master arm switch to the weapons control displays, switchs, HUD knobs, etc. You can even change your payload if you like before the mission and the game will display a picture of the weapon and it’s statistics. Of course, you always have your trusty cannon – nothing cuts through enemy equipment like depleted uranium shells!