MiG-29 Fulcrum

STORY / GAMEPLAY
The MiG-29 Fulcrum is one of the best combat airplanes in the world so there is plenty of potential in this, first ever, combat flight simulator from Domark. The game starts in a fairly impressive way with a grungy heavy metal intro tune (!) followed by a brief sequence that shows the MiG flying over Kremlin. You can select a mission out of the six available. One of them is a flight training where after crashing to the ground it takes you back to the runway (in all other missions every crash is fatal!) The rest missions include submarine-hunting in the Arctic, dog-fights with Chinese fighters over the Great Wall, attacking and destroying bridges, vehicles and SAM sites plus a final multi-role scenario where you destroy a nuclear power plant in the desert. But in order to reach to the last mission you must first gather 500 points in total. The cockpit is much like the real life Fulcrum, including systems such as HUD (Head Up Display), weapon selection and engine controls (similar to other combat flight simulators). You may use either a joystick or a mouse + keyboard to control the aircraft. The game is very fun to play although its limited action and its classic scenarios that do not support any expansion / mission disks.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
Although you get a cool picture depicting each mission's scenario, the exterior graphics are on the minimal side; deserts, ice fields or night landscapes depending on the missions are presented quite simple without any texture mapping. The Amiga's CPU seems to perform a bit slower than the Atari ST counterpart and much lower than the Acorn Archimedes' version, the latter being absolutely awesome (sporting flawless animation). Note that both Amiga and Archimedes versions use up to 32 colors on-screen while the ST has only 16. Nevertheless, the actual differences among those three versions can be spotted only on the static screens between the missions. The sound is OK and includes a nice intro tune but only a few sampled sound effects (like the engine, gun / missile fire and explosions).