F-16 Falcon Strike 2.0.2

An update review by Dietrich

It’s been over a year now since the excellent combat flight simulator “F-16 Falcon Strike” was released.
As a reminder: In the simulator, you fly an F-16 that can be equipped with various weapons to destroy different targets such as fighter jets, bombers, tanks, and anti-aircraft stations. But these targets fight back with onboard cannons and missiles. And even the final landing on the runway at your home airfield isn’t exactly easy.

In addition to fantastic graphics, sound effects improved through several updates, and a variety of weather conditions – including nighttime – the simulator offers six training missions and an entire campaign consisting of 15 missions that provide a continuous storyline.

The only drawbacks are that, in the missions, you first have to fly to the destination before the actual action begins, which takes quite a while. And once you’ve played through the campaign, which isn’t easy, it would actually be nice to have some additional missions.

The author addressed these shortcomings in January with Update 2.0.2 from the last quarter: The starting screen now features four additional game modes:

WARFARE: After a selection screen for difficulty and the number of targets (“Map Difficulty”), this mode launches – fully armed (actually, over-armed) – right into the air near the enemies, without any tedious preparation. The goal is to destroy all enemy depots and airfields and capture cities, which are handled by automatically generated ground troops. The computer opponent, of course, does the same. Just the thing for action fans!

What’s interesting is that the mission is generated entirely from a 16-bit seed number. This means you can either replay a mission or start a newly generated one by having the game generate a new seed number or by entering one yourself.

QUICK GAME: This is for people who are in a real hurry: It simply launches “Warfare” directly with Map Difficulty 5. But be careful: The default difficulty levels are high. It’s better to select “Warfare” first and at least set “Enemy Experience” to “Easy”; otherwise, you’ll get shot down pretty quickly.

GENERATOR: Here, a 16-bit seed number is used to generate an entirely new campaign with multiple missions. In each mission, you have one main objective and one secondary objective to complete. So if you’ve already played through the original campaign, accessible via the “CAMPAIGN” menu option, you’ll be treated to an almost unlimited number of new campaigns here. Of course, they’re similar, but the destinations and objectives are different every time.

SINGLE: Same as GENERATOR, but only a single mission is played.

There are plenty of other improvements as well. For example, there’s finally a warning if you fly too low with the landing gear retracted, so you no longer have to constantly keep an eye on the altitude gauge. A few additional sound effects, such as the landing gear extending and retracting, have also been added to the game. However, it takes some getting used to that the distance to the target is now displayed on the right multifunction display No. 2 in multiples of 256 if it is greater than 256. Thus, “2M” means the distance is between 256 and 512. This simplifies the square root calculation in the game, making the simulator even faster.

As always, full details about the game are available on the website https://webchrono.pl/F16FalconStrike/index.html. (For a brief introductory guide, see ABBUC-Magazin 159.) It doesn’t get any better than this! All in all, a fantastic update to the best combat flight simulator for the Atari!

My Rating:

• Graphics: 10
• Sound: 8
• Fun: 10

Overall Rating (3 Testers):

• Graphics: 9.3
• Sound: 7.7
• Fun: 8.0

Overall: 8.2

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