Nostalgic Tornado review (1999)

[Frankie]

Tornado... where to begin?

The Tornado is a ground attack aircraft. Heavy, very sturdy, extremely fast at low altitudes (where it spends it's time) and with a lot of auto-pilot modes. It does not turn fast, and is a lousy dogfighter. But it can run away faster and lower than anything out there.

The game does not model a specific geographical setting. Rather it has 3 pseudo-european theaters, and one Iraqi-like desert theater. Your side is Blue and made up of US/UK war machines. The other side is Orange and made up of soviet war machines.

The theaters themselves are populated by a vast array of objects: towns, airfields, railroad stations, roads, highways, bridges over/under passes, filling stations, storage tank farms, office buildings, civilian structures, power plants, etc etc etc. There is always something flying past under you as you zip along. The sensation of speed is quite evident. And this world operates logically. Dropping bridges behind the front lines does slow the resupply and reinforcement of forces, for instance. And the world is busy. There are other enemy a/c, other allied a/c all doing there thing w/o your input. There are also trains and trucks moving around. The weather varies, cloud types and layers vary.

The game presents you with 2 ways to fly: a simulator that is just like the "real" game except you don't die after you crash, and you can learn and experiment w/o penalty. But the Campaigns are where the action is, and the Mission Planner is the core of the campaign. You can fly in 3 levels of campaign: the basic level has the game assign you and your wingman mission orders, and presents you with a plotted mission. The middle level presents you, your wingmen, and 3 other 2-plane flight groups with plotted missions (which you can change, add to, etc). The highest level of play presents you with the map and various intel. You decide how to allocate all your strike groups. Looking at the map you see where your higher command has already assigned an AWACS and F15 CAP. You decide whether you need an additional CAP or will allocate all your wings to strikes. (There is an interceptor variant of the Tornado you can assign &/or fly).

Your main task throughout the game is to shut down the 4 enemy airfields and keep them down. Once you have a handle on that you go after other targets. But you also have layers of Air Defence to strip down. Long range radars, localized AAA and SAMS. The enemy also has airborne warning radar craft, etc. The way you peel back the enemies defenses and target assets and transportation, front line and reserve units is very intelligently modeled. You have a lot of choices and trade-offs to make as you plan how to wage your war.

The Mission Planner allows you wide control over your flights. You can set wings of 1-6 (?) Tornado's (You almost always use 2 per group). You can have wingmen share waypoints, or split off independently and then rejoin later. You can specify waypoint action, weapon, altitude, speed, time. Sometimes you assign a specific speed. Other times you specify a specific time for that w/p and the speed is adjusted to meet it. Most of the time your flights will be at 200' and 550kts.

The essence of the attack is to get all the Tornado's attacking at low altitude during the same handful of seconds from different directions - and overwhelm the defenses. If you plan and execute well the enemy will go from being bored to bombs exploding around them, to empty skies again all in 20-30 seconds. Like trying to get a 8 golfers to drop holes-in-one on the same hole w/in a few seconds of each other. ;-)

Add to this task the variances of time of day or night, winds, low level clouds or ground fog of varying thickness. Of course AA is hooting at your, SAM's are arcing in, and your RWR is lighting up with a Mig on your 6. <G> Then imagine that in the middle of the night in thick fog you have taken hits that keep you from unfolding the wings and they are in full swept back position. So you have to land at high speed, and have no use of flaps. You've also lost one engine, and there is a 50 deg crosswind of 18kts at your field - which may or may not have a busted runway from an enemy attack while you were away. Quite a challenge! <g>

Your weapons are made up of heavy and very heavy bombs - retarded and slick. Plus a cool anti-radar missle that has a direct and loiter mode. And the anti-runway JP233 pack - a bunch of little rockets that
penetrate and rip up runways. Oh, and a very neat LGB which you'll only use after you've seriously stripped down the enemy defenses. but once you have you can carry 8 of those busters and fly racetrack patterns over sites and guide them down 1 by 1.

And I forgot to mention in my "difficult landing" scenario that it would have been a long mission with heavy payload, and there was a sustained dash on afterburners - (burn that fuel!) - so you've been running on fumes for the last few minutes... ;-) Just another thing to worry about. One such mission I ran out just short of the runway...

I feel that I still have not even scratched the surface in my explanation. But I'll stop here. It takes months to master this game. But it will reward that effort many times over. If this game were in 640x480 and had comms for co-op or FS/BS it would be hard to get me to consider playing anything else. I keep hoping for a new game with a mission planner and dynamic campaign, in a populated environment like this one.

--
                               XXXXXXXXX
                                   XXXXXXXX
                                       XXXXXXX
                                          XXXXXX
                                           XXXXX
                                           XXXX
                                          XXX
                                          XX
==> HiFi/DirtyTwisters <==   X


Source: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.flight-sim/HiFi%7Csort:relevance/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.flight-sim/2_tmNZq0lQ8/Oy3Jq85-KrwJ