And it was a very different experience than in AH. I have somehow managed to figure out the keymapping and joystick calibration, so off I went in a 109E last night looking for a fight. Since there is no dar bar or radar dots, finding a fight is a bit like playing the lottery. I flew in the general direction of the Allied lines looking for a fight. I was up high, around 15,000 ft, above a very nice looking cloud layer. Couldn't buy a con in about 20 minutes, so I started back home, descending to about 5,000 ft. As I'm crusing home, I'm scanning the map for an airfield, any airfield. I couldn't find a way to zoom the map out(don't even know if that is possible), so once my airbase went off it, I was lost!
The engine management is nice, so I turn my thottle RPM's to economy mode, throttle back and hope I don't run out of fuel before I find a base. Then I notice some pretty red tracers go whistling over my right wing. So I instantly break left and look back---OOPS! Forgot, no six view in WW2OL. So I look to my rear left and right, can't see diddly. I dive for some speed, increase revs to max RPM's, push the throttle to the wall, and do a zoom climb, a wingover, and then finally see my adversary--a French Hawk 75.
This guy can't be very good, because I somehow got on his six and shot him down. Feeling very satisfied, I continued on my journal and luckily stumbled upon a friendly base. Coming in for my first landing, I drop flaps and gear, reduce revs, chop throttle.....and promptly stall and end up flipped over on the grassy field.
Oh well, it was fun. From my one flight, here are my observations so far:
The FM feels good in the air, maybe even a little better than AH. I'm not a pilot, so I have no experience to base this on, but the planes acted more smoothly when flying. Manuvering on the ground is challenging, much more so than in AH. Dunno if this is a good thing, but it's definately different!
SA is much more difficult than AH, because of the lack of a rear view or adjustable views, and the lack of dots and dar bar. So it is much more difficult to find a fight. On the other hand, it felt a lot more realistic. I had to really look around me at all times. Still, I felt blind during my dogfight. I lost track of my opponent many times in the fight.
Instead of a detailed damage list, you have a lame "Quake-like" health and stamina meter thingie that goes down as you take damage to your body. For a sim that is so much more realistic in so many ways, I'm surprised that they would use this type of system in the aircraft. I can understand using that sort of display when you're playing a ground soldier, but not in an aircraft.
All in all, I had a good time, and while I can't say yet that I'm definately going to keep my account open at the end of this re-trial period, the chances are good that I will. I spent some time running around as a Soldat last night, too, and had some fun defending a town.
One thing I can say without reservation is that WW2OL has come a long way from what I remember in the beginning last year. it's not in direct competition with AH, IMO, because the focus of the two games are completely different.
Frame rates are up to an acceptable rate(avg of 25fps in the air at 1600x1200x32), but then again I'm running on an AMD XP2100+ with 512MB of DDR-SDRAM and a GF4 Ti4400.
I'm going to give it a real workout in the next week until the trial is over and before AH 1.10 comes out, so I'll keep you posted.
Oh, and Oct....my callsign is banana24 over there.
