"Pilot to Crew: OK gunners look sharp... get on 'em guys"
"Pilot from Tail... ah... negative sir... hold fire... looks like a bunch a simmers"
"Pilot to Tail... simmers?... I thought they were our friends!"
"Tail to Pilot... ah ... these guys look pretty mean sir... I think they're multiplayer models"
"OK... Pilot to Nav... gimme a heading to get us out of here"
Is there stuff wrong with this sim? You bet there is. But you know what? There's stuff wrong with every sim. If you look closely and from the viewpoint of what the sim is trying to do I think you'll find there's a lot more right than wrong here. Which is why it gets the Four Star rating in spite of its flaws which we'll talk about.
But that's my opinion. What happens with B-17 in the community at large and how it ultimately shakes out in the hierarchy of combat sims comes down to whether or not the publishers give it continuing support and take on some of the main gripes people have. If they do B-17 can and should take a place among the classics of the genre because I think that overall the sim works and it works very well at
what it tries to do – which as we'll see – is to convey a fairly narrow picture of one important aspect of the air war over Europe. So let's hope that the conversation above continues something like this:
"OK Radio... go ahead... read it"
"Roger, sir... it sez we should press on to the target... there's also something about a patch... can't quite make it out."
"Patch??... what are they talking about?... well we've got a lot of holes from the simmers... maybe that's it... those Sales & Marketing... er, I mean, Headquarters... pukes never get anything right anyway... aw'right guys we're goin on... where's the target now Nav?"
Mission Briefing
It's "zero dark thirty." It's cold and dark as you pull on your flight suit, leather flight jacket, and press your visor cap down on your head. It doesn't quite have the 50 mission crush to it you've seen on some of the other guys but it's getting there. As you enter the briefing room there's a buzz of conversation from the other pilots, navs, bombardiers, and radio operators gathered for the brief. The rest of your crew is out at the plane starting the pre-flight. You look around. After today's mission how many of the faces you see will be missing from the next brief? Will yours be one of them? As you settle into a wooden folding chair
next to your Co-pilot and Nav the conversation dies down as the squadron intel officer steps up to the podium.
"Good morning flight simming gentlemen (and ladies if there are any of you out there in the briefing area). Today's mission is to review "B-17 Flying Fortress: The Mighty 8th." I'll cover the main features and some other observations. After that it's up to you. Good luck!"
First off I think it would help to get some historical and game focus perspective.
Historically, this sim recreates in some detail (but by no means in every single aspect) the daylight bombing campaign of the U.S. Army 8th Air Force (the "Mighty 8th") over occupied Western Europe and Germany during World War II. The sim missions run from roughly late 1943 until early in 1945. As in the real campaign missions are flown from a complex of bases in England.
From a game perspective a critical point to understand in any discussion of B-17 is that the sim has a very narrow focus. Maybe I should say that again—a very narrow focus!
That focus is on the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, its 10 man crew, and the typical missions 8th Air Force crews flew. So if you approach it from the standpoint of expecting every feature you could ever want in a World War II flight sim—as some simmers and reviewers seem to be doing—you are going to be very disappointed.
It's also important to understand what B-17 is not. It's not a dogfighting sim and it's not a fighter sim. Fighters show up and do things. You can fly them if you want to. In fact you should make a point to fly the German ones to get a sense of what was involved in attacking a tight formation of B-17's with massed defensive fire. And you should fly some escort missions in the "Little Friends" and take on the Luftwaffe interceptors. But in the end that's not what B-17 is mainly about. Those are sideshows to the main event. Interesting, but sideshows. What this release is about is giving you a very good idea of what B-17 bombing missions typically involved.
It does that by immersing you in all of the stuff the bomber crews had to deal with to get through their individual missions as well as survive their overall 25 (later in the war 35) mission tour of duty. Making those numbers got you membership in the elite "Lucky Bastards" Club. Club members got orders home.
Some of what B-17 crews had to endure was good, some of it was bad, a lot of it was ugly, and—yes folks—a lot of the time it was boring and the missions were repetitive. But hey - that's life! That's entertainment! That's how it really was! "Got mission fatigue son? Don't know if you can make it through your next 20 missions? Looks like you need to go see the Chaplain!"
But don't take my word for it. If you really want to appreciate how well done this sim is in recreating the typical bombing mission scenario get a copy of Martin Bowman's excellent and authoritative book "B-17 Flying Fortress Units of the Eighth Air Force (Part I)" published by Osprey Publishing. Read (or skim thru) the book and then fly a couple of the historical missions in the sim. If you do I guarantee it will hit you squarely between the eyes how well the designers have captured the 8th Air Force aircraft and missions!
For you visual people out there head to your local video outlet and find a VHS or DVD copy of any of following movies:"Memphis Belle" (an early 90's release); "Twelve O'Clock High" (a 1949 b&w classic starring Gregory Peck), or "The War Lover" (a 60s era b&w release starring Steve McQueen). They all feature lots of accurate interior and exterior footage (much of
it shot in real combat) of B-17's and crews in action including some outstanding cockpit sequences. Again, I predict once you've seen one of these flicks and then flown the sim you'll be amazed at B-17's fidelity to the real thing.
OK – had enough perspective? Let's get to the sim.
Game Features
If you've been around combat sims for a while you know that B-17 is not a new title. The original Microprose release of this sim was in back in 1992 and was designed to run on IBM 286, 386, and 486 machines, DOS 5.0 or higher, and 640K of memory according to the box specs. Remember those days guys? Remember the fun of playing around with all the DOS memory restrictions trying to get things to run right? Autoexec.bats? Config.sys? Ah... the memories.
Turns out a few weeks ago I found a pristine copy of the original 1992 B-17 release in a box in our attic while executing one of those weekend "honey do" task lists we all know and love. Makes for some interesting comparisons with the current version and it made me stop and think for a minute. We have come a long way folks—in our rush to criticize some of the features of current day releases I think we sometimes tend to forget that fact!
Flash forward to 2001. No DOS, no memory hassles. Pop the CD in and watch the install. Went smooth as glass for me and should for you on any moderate current technology machine. Current box specs are minimum PII 300, 128 MB RAM, 700 MB disk space, 8 MB video memory card. Check the specs below in this review for my review system—the sim runs great on it with all graphics options maxed. Just for kicks I installed it on my old system – a PII 300 with 96 MB RAM, and dirtball 4 MB video card—the only real problem on this machine is with some of the exterior graphics—prop
circles and contrails mainly being solid—otherwise the sim – especially if you stay with interior views – runs fine. Framerates are generally smooth although I've noticed a tendency for the sim to redraw terrain textures for a few seconds when changing views which can be distracting. This happens on both systems.
The general message here though is that if you're anywhere above my old system specs—and I suspect if I had more RAM or a better video card on the old system the exteriors would clean up—you should be pretty much golden for most gameplay. One thing you see a lot of complaints about on the forums are the sim causing frequent Crashes to Desktop (CTDs). It gets mentioned enough
to have gotten Hasbro's attention and promise to address it in the first patch release, but I personally have never experienced this problem with either system in coming up on 2 months of gameplay. This
includes installs of both the original European release and the current U.S. release CDs. While waiting for the patch Iain Howe from the Wayward development team has compiled a list of fixes for common problems causing CTDs as well as other performance issues and posted it over at bombs-away.net. If you have
problems try checking this document which you can download here.
As is pretty much standard on sim releases these days B-17 features an options screen that allows you to scale the game's performance features both from the standpoint of overall difficulty, realism, AI level of skill, graphics detail and such. I always run combat sims on max difficulty, realism, and options settings and recommend you do too. Scale the graphics detail for a level your system can comfortably handle. Not really too much out of the ordinary in this department.
What is out of the ordinary and what sets B-17 apart in its own unique little world is its focus on crew interaction and management. The B-17 carries 10 crew members and you can fly missions in any of the 10 positions or jump between them at will. To successfully get through a tour as pilot and aircraft commander you must keep track of what and how well your crew are doing in their jobs and give them direction as the mission progresses. You must be concerned with their overall well being and level of training. Exactly as you would have to do in the real world. Having spent more than a few hours as a real world aircraft commander on multi-crewed airplanes I can tell you that this aspect of the mission frequently
can occupy a whole lot more time and effort than the pure flying aspects. Constant intercom chatter and reports require a lot of attention. With the exception of the original B-17 release I can't think of another air combat sim that approaches this level of crew interaction complexity and sophistication. The helo sims are the closest and that typically involves just a pilot and co-pilot/gunner. A piece of cake by comparison.
B-17 allows you to sim on a lot of different levels. Pure flying as pilot or co-pilot, flying and crew management as an aircraft commander, flying in any one of the 8 non pilot crew positions, or squadron commander responsible both for your crew and aircraft as well as a 6 plane squadron and overall campaign mission planning. I haven't worked out the numbers but that's a lot of different combinations. Certainly enough to hold my interest for a fair amount of time but apparently not enough for a lot of simmers and some reviewers if you read their gripes. Only you can decide what's right for you but in my
opinion there's more than enough variety and depth built into this release to make for non repetitive and interesting simming.
Let's talk flight simming as an example for a minute. Forget the crew and combat stuff. Just as a pure flight sim I think B-17 has a lot going for it. The instrument panels for the B-17 are very detailed and most (but not all!) of the gauges and switches are functional. So if you are switch flipper and a gauge reader there's a lot here for you in terms of experiencing what it takes to fly a large, multi engine prop airplane. There are detailed checklists if you want to take the time to go through them or you can sit back and listen to the AI pilots go through an accurate start and shutdown sequence. Not perfect but overall, a a pretty darn good representation of the tasks involved from the pilot's seats.
That's the good news on instrument panels. The bad news is that the available views make flying using the detailed instrument panel pretty difficult because there is no "pan and scan" instrument view capability—you're always head down in the cockpit and the pilot's virtual views (termed "Action Views" in the sim) don't have working instruments so they don't help much as far as using the instruments go. The other bad news (and a source of considerable grousing among simmers) is that the engine instruments do not appear to be accurately implemented for detailed engine management—so if you're a simmer who wants to precisely set the turbo supercharger for cruise or manage your temperatures using the cowl flaps you're not going to be able to get to that exact level. At least not yet. Maybe in a future patch. But as far as general flight duties in the pilot seats go B-17 is well done and I find it a pleasure to just fly the airplane. So if you want to start and shut down engines, fly patterns, shoot some touch and goes, or practice engine out landings for a hour or so you can enjoy the sim on just a flying level.
Which brings me to flight models. Wanna start an argument among simmers? I can't think of a better way than to bring up the subject of flight models. In this regard you should know that a lot of criticism has been leveled at B-17 on the forums and in reviews concerning flight models both for the B-17 and especially the fighters. One thing I can say here is that when the aircraft are under AI control flight performance is not realistic. For example if you watch the vertical speed indicator with the B-17 under AI control on takeoff it climbs at 3000 feet per minute (fpm)—a rate many modern jets would like to have and not even remotely close to the climb rate of a bomb and fuel laden B-17. However, when I tried the same takeoff manually and pitched up to and held a 3000 fpm climb the airspeed rapidly decayed and I stalled, crashed and burned – as you would expect. The correct climb rate for a loaded down B-17—as is stated in the user manual and confirmed by Boeing aircraft specs—is around 300-500 fpm. When I flew the manual takeoff at this rate there was no problem. And staying with that climb rate would have taken a realistic time to climb to cruise altitude.
One super cool aspect of the B-17 flight model is the representation of prop shutdown and feathering—the best of any current flight sim civil or military in my view. One thing you can be sure of in B-17 is that sooner or later you're going to take engine damage requiring you to shutdown the damaged engine and feather the prop. Feathering involves stopping and positioning the prop blade so that it is parallel to the airflow thereby reducing the enormous drag of a shutdown engine with a windmilling prop. To see this take manual control and shutdown one of your outboard engines (#1 or #4) with keyboard commands but don't feather it. Observe the control inputs necessary to counteract the drag. Go to an external view and observe the windmilling prop rotating at a much lower speed than the others. Now feather the prop. You'll notice much less control input required and when you go to an exterior view there's the blade stopped and correctly positioned parallel to the airflow. Correct and outstanding in every regard!
As far as the fighters go my basic test of flight models is stall and spin characteristics. It took more effort than it should and the effects were not as pronounced as I think they would be in the real airplane but I was able (unlike some big name sims) to produce reasonably accurate stalls and spins.
So here's my take. I don't find B-17's flight models to be significantly better or worse than those in of the other big name WWII flight sims such as EAW, Jane's WWII Fighters or CFS2. In my view they are representative of relative performance—not arcade level but not precise. I guess "within spec" for a PC based mass market simulation is how I would rate them.
On to other stuff. Graphics. Top notch in my view. The aircraft exteriors are drop dead gorgeous. With due regard for my prior comments on the view and engine gauge function limitations the detailed instrument panels are the same. Flak bursts and damage effects are outstanding. The depiction of aerial tracer rounds is superior to anything else I have seen. Interior compartment views are good—they are 2D and the crew figures are not as well drawn as the physical structures—but quite adequate for creating the atmosphere inside the airplane. Some graphics effects that would really put this sim over the top would be some different paint schemes – such as the olive drab used on some aircraft – and squadron and bomb group markings on the tail and fuselage. In light of the other detail touches in the sim I'm very surprised these got left out. Shouldn't be too hard to do and hopefully will show up in a patch or be available from the ever resourceful combat sim third party developers world. Finally, although you can select from a library of custom nose art for your bomber and enter a different name the nose art shows up on the airplane but the name doesn't. It would sure be nice to have my crew's "Bomb Girl III" name show up under the picture. Again, not something that ought to be too hard to do.
There is, however, lots of attention to little details. Here are some examples. Above 10,000 feet all of the crew figures switch to oxygen masks – just as in the real world. If you look at the oxygen flow "blinkers" you will see them active. We're all used to seeing shell casings being ejected from outside views in WWII sims. How about an inside shell casings view? Check the door gunner's compartment view when firing! And watch the control surfaces on AI aircraft lining up for takeoff. Notice the "free and easy" control movement of the ailerons, elevators, and rudder – again just as in the real world. Watch the Luftwaffe interceptors do a slow roll as they cut through the bomber formations on their firing passes – exactly as they did in the real world. And finally, look at the relative motion of your wingmen as they make constant adjustments up and down and back and forth as you fly formation – just the way real airplane formation flying looks. These are a few examples that demonstrate the care and attention that went into the visual aspects of this sim. If you look you will see lots more.
Before I go off it let me add one thing about formation flying—which was a critical part of all B-17 missions and an essential skill for all B-17 pilots. Formation flying in the real world takes concentration and constant attention and one careless move can end in disaster. If you don't think so take the airplane off AI enroute to the target and manually try to keep position on your wingmen. Imagine doing it for 8-10 hours while dodging weather and enemy action. During real WWII B-17 missions mid air collisions with other B-17s in the formation (and getting hit by friendly fire from gunners in other B-17s shooting through the formation at German fighters) were common occurrences, as was getting hit by falling bombs from aircraft above you in the formation if you were out of place. Not some of the hazards you usually think of on B-17 missions and certainly something to keep you from getting bored on those long missions and a real motivator to fly precise formation!
Weather is a big factor in real world flying but weather is minimal in B-17. While the clouds that are depicted are realistic looking there is no discernible variety in the types. Basically you get varying degrees of thin stratus coverage. Some different clouds and some with vertical development would vastly improve realism. Cloud coverage does affect your ability to see your target and aim your bombs and there are winds that affect your navigator's accuracy and for which you must determine and apply a correction in your bombsight for your bomb fall but that's about it for environmental effects. Of course target visibility and nav accuracy were the key items for a WWII pre precision all weather weapons era bombing mission so the basics are covered but nothing extra here.
The User Manual. Unfortunately, recent combat sim releases lead to the inescapable conclusion that the day of the big, thick "settle down in a comfy chair for a long read" user manual is over. It's pretty clear publishers are using this as a cost cutting area and it looks like B-17 is no exception to this sad trend. The Manual is 152 pages (as opposed to the 226 in the original 1992 release) and is what I would term adequate. Good explanations of some things, not so good explanations of others. Pictures are mostly small and barely useable. Nothing to write home about here.
Let me comment on a few other odds and ends. There's been a lot of complaining in the community about the lack of multi-player capability in B-17—especially since in the pre-release descriptions Hasbro apparently indicated it would be included. I can see where the multi player aspects of this sim could be awesome if realized. I can also see where it would require a tremendous amount of programming time and testing and could be a bugfix nightmare. Looks like that resource requirement was too much. I have some sympathy for that dilemma as somebody who is in the software development business. It's easy to talk about features and functionality and "rushing things out before they're ready" as long as it's not your money that's funding the development. Software development programs have a very unfortunate tendency to take 4 times as long and cost 10 times as much as original estimates. At some point you have to call it a wrap and go with the program—even if it means short circuiting some features. The alternative is frequently no program at all and no future programs. Call it what you want those are the facts of life in the real world. I'm not sure what the solution to this is in terms of companies continuing to produce combat flight sims but one thing I am sure of—bashing combat sim developers and publishers is not the answer. Food for thought.
A couple of other areas for improvement I want to mention are in the interfaces, sound and the AI. I found a real annoyance for me is the way the sim switches from manual to computer control when you shift views. So that if you go from a manually flying internal view to an external aircraft view you are suddenly back under computer AI control and vice versa. Not a real biggie but requiring an extra step to keep up. Same way with the mission and options selection screen which requires flipping a switch after the top level menu choice to get where you're going. Seems like unnecessary work. Again, more annoying than anything serious. Soundwise I've noticed that the sound mysteriously cuts out on occasion for no apparent reason. Usually happens in an exterior view. Other simmers have also reported this bug. Needs fixing!
Finally a word on the AI. Seems to need some peaking and tweaking. There are two many mid air collisions between intercepting fighters and B-17s plus the AI Navigator does stuff like say "I'm totally lost and don't have a clue where we are" and then seconds later gives a precise heading to the next turn point. Something's wrong there.
Conclusions
So how did it all come out? Did B-17 hit the target? To a large extent I would say yes. Yes there are flaws and bugs that need fixing. But contrary to a lot of criticism in the community and other reviews, I found B-17 pretty much right on the mark in terms of providing a realistic picture of typical WWII B-17 bombing missions as measured against actual combat film footage and authoritative written accounts. It also provided plenty of features for depth and variety of gameplay for those who want to take advantage of them. And it was obvious to me that a lot of thought and attention to detail went into getting the look and feel right. In that regard it is a real success plus the crew coordination aspects are a ground breaking step forward in the evolution of combat flight sims. I salute the development team for those achievements.
B-17 is not the ultimate WWII sim but I don't think it was ever intended to be. If you approach it in terms of what it is trying to do—which is demonstrate all of the key events in a B-17 mission—planning, briefing, pre-flighting & taking off, flying formation, fighting off enemy fighters, dodging flak, handling inflight emergencies and managing the crew, putting the bombs on target and getting back home and landing safely—I think you'll like what you see a whole lot.
As Squadron Intel Officer debriefing the mission I'd rate B-17's success in terms of the target as 80% destroyed but will probably require a "mission refly" in the form of a patch or two to complete the job. In this regard Hasbro has promised a near term release to address technical issues such as CTDs and a later version to improve gameplay. All to the good in my book. So I don't know about you but something tells me B-17 is going to be in my stable for some time to come.
"Pilot to Nav, how about a heading for home?"
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