Birds of Prey

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Birds of Prey is a fairly complex combat flight simulator by Argonaut Software, featuring a lot of different planes and missions. It offers the stunning selection of 40 aircraft to fly (!). The game is focused on a real time campaign environment on a fictitious map, with two sides taking part, Side A (Blue), composed of Western aircraft (resembling NATO), and Side B (Red), composed of Eastern aircraft. The depicted game's map is fictitious, but it's strategically interesting, with 3 airbases for each Side, and one aircraft carrier plus several useful ground facilities like factories, power-plants, radar stations, cities. You can pick a mission and get into the cockpit of just about anything going, for either side. You can mount attacks on ships, factories, and tank battalions. And yes, you may also drop supplies from your Hercules, or strafe an area with the A-10's big gun or refuel in mid air (!), a feature that was introduced for the first time on flight sims! More on these note that the Amiga version contained a breathtaking intro that is sadly completely missing in the PC version of the game.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
Well, the in-game graphics in Birds of Prey are good for their time, above average in fact, but the landscape graphics are not as detailed as I was expecting. The game on the DOS runs in several graphics modes, depending on your graphics adapter (CGA - 4 colors, EGA-16 colors and VGA- up to 256 colors). In VGA mode, it offers a few more colors compared to the Amiga version and it also runs faster. The 3D animation is quite smooth and the aircraft animations (i.e. the folding wings of the F-111, Tornado, F-14) are really impressive. Also the aircraft weapons is visible, a feature missing in all other combat flight simulators of its time. The sound is pretty good and supports AdLib, Soundblaster or even Roland MT32 sound hardware with a variety nicely sampled sound effects (excellent jet engine sounds and more). You can even hear the enemy missiles flying past you, which is very impressive!