Description Combat Flight Simulator 3 is the most detailed and immersive World War II PC combat flight simulation ever, letting you experience what it is really like to be a WWII combat pilot over Europe. Set in Europe from 1943 to the end of the war, you can enlist and fly for the US Army Air Force, the RAF, or the Luftwaffe. With an emphasis on tactical air power, many of your missions will focus on Air Superiority, Close Air Support, and Tactical Bombing. Feel the heart pounding rush of strafing enemy positions at 350 mph, 600 feet above the European countryside, guns blazing and bombs blasting, its As Real As it Gets!
Summary: Had played CFS2 for some time and was looking forward to CFS3 after hearing all the hype on it. It has been on of the biggest disappointments in a game ever. I would love to have my money back to put it into something I will play. I will probably be mothballing this game soon, no need to take up good space in computer.
I keep trying to find something positive to say about this game but just can't find much of a plus anywhere.
Summary: When I saw this at London Drugs for a mere $7, when there were still copies on the shelf at $68 (someone was asleep at the price gun!), how could I say no? I have had great fun with CFS1 & 2, and I thought the quality of the series could only improve. What I wound up with was a game, that although superb value for the money, was a mish-mash of trade offs and compromises that, unless you're a die hard fan of filght sims in general (I've played sims from back in the day of Apple ][+ through the much missed and lamented 1942: Pacific Air War), could be hard to forgive at first glance.In the CFS family, however, this is a mediocre release in comparison with it's bretheren.
Summary: I was really looking forward to CFS3, Finaly being able to fly bombers, Awesome WW2 Aircraft,and with my new PC no problems with too high system recs. It didn't turn out as i thought...
Summary: CFS 3 one of the most unpolished games this year. It takes around 20 downloads to make the game better. The people at microsoft had a good idea with the dynamic campagain instead of a progresive one but it's way too hard. It's even hard when you inlimited weapons. CFS 1 has better graphic than this. I wasn't happy with the effort the put into this but with all the downloads this games all 4's but with out them this game is 3's and 2's. There 's no infantry and you too buy a joystick. To me this games is a waste of money.
Rating Reviewed by: Joe Smeghead(Unregistered User)
Review Date June 18, 2003
Overall Rating 1 of 5
Visitors rate this review 1.00 of 5,
1 votes
Review NaN of 41
, from Australia
Price Paid:
$40.00
Summary: First experience:
It installed Ok, in fact it was much quicker than the installs of other MS Sims I've bought. The game ran OK for the first time and upon getting to the 'menu' screen I started configuring by doing nothing more than changing the screen resolution from 800 x 600 @ 16bit to 1024 x 768 @ 32 bit. Immediatly after making the change the machine re-booted by itself. I restarted and repeated the above several times with the same result. After another re-start I used the config tool to set the resolution back to 'default' ie 800 x 600 @ 16bit. I hadn't changed any sliders yet!! The game would not start again each time crashing at the splash screen. I re-installed the game and got it started again without making any changes. I managed to do about 2 minutes of free-flight in the Spitfire and it crashed again. After yet another re-start I started the game again only to get an error message saying that 1) my 'unlimitedPilots.xml' file was invalid or corrupt and 2) the 'mission' file (for free flight) could not be loaded. While all this was happening the screen was flickering at a constant 20-30Hz as I was clicking away all the message dialogs. I have now reinstalled it 3 times, checked these forums for advice, made many changes but to no avail. My system is:
Athlon XP1800+ (~1533Mhz) Abit KT7a Rev1.3 (KT133) 512Mb SDRam SB Live (latest drivers) 64Mb GeForce3 (41.09 drivers) DirectX 8.2 (Installed by CFS3) Win XP Pro
I also have FS2002 Pro and CFS2 on the same setup, they both run very well with no issues whatsoever. I have to agree with so many people that this software has something fundamentally wrong with it. Further I would discourage all those people with similar problems from altering your system so as to run this piece of crap at the possible expense of affecting all the other applications that run very well on your system. As a general rule if your system spec is somewhere between the minimum required and the recommended then basically it should run right out of the box with only minor system changes required (new drivers etc). If you wish to upgrade to enhance the game then that is your business. As you can see from the spec above there is nothing unique about my setup that should prevent 'good' software from operating correctly. I had seriously thought about ditching CFS3 but I will give MS the opportunity to fix it.
After the Patch release: I upgraded all my video, sound and chipset drivers ie:
4403 from nVidia 252's from Creative, and 447 Via drivers
Re-installed the game again and based on the opinions and experiences with others I made the following changes:
The game amazingly enough ran but with a lot of stutter. What I noticed though was that the frame rate was quite good, 30+ in dogfight with 5 enemies with settings at 4 across the board. The stutter appeared to be as a result of textures, buildings and other environmental things happening in the background. Originally I thought my paging file was at fault but I dismissed this on the basis that it was 1Gb in size already and there was not HD activity, it seemed to be more processing related be it CPU / GPU. The stutter improved after a few minutes but the general 'un-smooth' nature of the game made it largely unplayable. Next I changed some of the composite texture settings in the config to use SystemMM rather than pooled, buffered or other methods. This was done based on feedback from other forums and improved the frame rates to about 35-40 but the stutter was still there. The 'clasic' tweak of disabling dual-pass rendering and enabling high-resolution Z-Buffer made no differance.
The conclusion:
I know it's like comparing apples to oranges but I base my experiences on FS2002. I run this on the same setup with the GA737 from Dreamfleet and I get a bueatiful looking, stutter free Sim at 1280 x 960 @ 32bit with literally everything on and still never drop below 30fps, most of the time its 40+. To get CFS3 even halfway to this point has taken a frustrating week of installing, re-installing, configuring and general technical mucking about just to get it to run. No software in this state should ever have been released in my opinion and my earlier statements still apply. Disregarding the technical issues for a moment I would also say that based on look and feel this has to be the worst sim Microsoft has released to date. It looks bad, it feels bad and problems with controllers, flight models and sensitivities make it frustrating to play. For example my aerilon sensitivity was too much at default and even with it backed back to its minimum the roll rate was unrealistically to high making the aircraft hard to control. I am sorry to say unfortunatly that Microsoft have created a dud with CFS3...
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