Review by: Brian Pipa

After 10 years as the biggest and most popular online flight simulator, Air Warrior finally makes it to a boxed version for the masses in Air Warrior II. With Air Warrior II, you can fly the online skies that you’re used to from Air Warrior, fly solo offline and hone your skills, or battle one-on-one with modem play. The online mode requires an Air Warrior account with AOL, Compuserve, Delphi Internet, or the Earthlink Network. More online services are on the way.

Air Warrior II provides the computer pilot with over 35 aircraft, over 300 missions, 6 different campaigns, and a mission editor to create your own. All scenarios are historically based, but not historically accurate. You fly accurate planes over historically based maps, but the actual missions did not actually occur. You can fly as the Axis or the Allies in the European or Pacific theatres, the Germans or the Allies in The Great War, or as the U.N. Forces or North Korea in the Korean War (see screenshot three).

In my opinion, the type of flight offered in Air Warrior II is much more challenging than the flight offered in jet flight simulators. Launching a heat-seeking missile and watching the enemy explode is not nearly as gratifying as dog-fighting with the enemy using nothing but machine-guns. You need to hit your opponent multiple times to finally bring him down. It’s a great feeling to chase down the enemy, stay on his tail, pump some lead into his fighter, then watch the pilot bail out and see his parachute pop open.

The whole interface in Air Warrior II is beautifully done (see screenshot two ). At any time in the menus, press the Alt key and tooltips will pop-up everywhere you can click for another menu. These are off by default, but novices can choose to have these tooltips on automatically. After a quick setup of my Logitech Wingman Warrior Extreme joystick and my sound system, I was ready to fly.

I chose Instant Action to get me going: no landing, no take-offs, no mission, you’re instantly dropped into the middle of a battle. The cockpit graphics are very nicely done and very impressive. All the gauges and instruments are realistically laid out and easily visible (and readable). There are three different basic cockpit views available: the default Situational Awareness view, the Combat view, and the Close Combat view. Each of these views shows varying amounts of gauges and instruments and a varying flight view size. The Close Combat view has maximum flight view and minimum instruments while the Situational Awareness view (see screenshot four) has maximum instruments and minimum flight view. These views are changed on-the-fly with the keyboard.

While flying, your comrades and enemies are indicated above your view with green and red icons, respectively (see screenshot one). Use this to figure out whether you’re chasing an enemy or one of your own men. At any time during flight, you have access to the area map, which shows relative positions of your plane, your squadron, the enemy, and waypoints. Waypoints can be just locations to fly to, or can be actual mission objectives like enemy airfields.