Falcon

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Falcon is the first and one of the best combat flight simulators I have ever played on the 16bit home computers. It's an authentic flight simulator and offers everything a player wanted to experience to its fullest, back in the days! So many players have invested plenty of flying hours (like me!) playing it. The missions provide dogfights and bridge bombings and they are designed for successive play, so anything you achieve on a previous mission will influence the outcome of any upcoming attempt! What is your final goal? Total destruction of highlighted ground targets and -of course- enemy MIGs! The ground targets vary from tanks, trains, amphibious landing crafts, trucks, bridges and ground-to-air missile sites! Sometimes the opposing jets make some very cool maneuvers while your plane's electronic displays and radars resemble the real thing with great success, giving you 4 different styles of HUD (Head Up Display). Not only can your plane barrel-roll and scissor; the enemy planes can too! Actually, the Artificial Intelligence recreates the moves of an actual pilot and the reactions of an actual F-16. This is one of the earliest games to offer a head-to-head gameplay by linking two machines. It comes with a massive manual, showing in details all those functions and maneuvers, mainly written by actual F-16 pilots! Note that the game supports head-to-head battles with another human opponent too (via direct computer link)! Well done Spectrum Holobyte! Your game is a masterpiece!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The PC (DOS) version supports an early 4-color CGA mode and another later version (called Falcon AT) that offers sharp 16-color EGA graphics. Both PC versions share good visuals with detailed (for its time) terrains and aircraft models. Due to the higher CPU clocks of the PC systems compared to the 8Mhz CPUs, the 3D graphics move smoother and faster compared to the ST and Amiga versions. But overall the game's visuals look and feel a bit inferior due to the 16-color selection of the EGA palette (the AT version). the screenshot we provide below are from both CGA and EGA versions (Falcon and Falcon AT) for comparison reasons. The PC sound is pretty poor in quality with the sound effects performed directly by the PC speaker. But the sound is adequate enough to play the game without complaints.