http://www.gamesdomain.com/gdreview/zones/reviews/pc/may00/ahso.html THE GOOD
Flight model - Excellent. Few sims force a player to interact with their aircraft with as much respect and awareness of its performance limitations as Aces High. Each aircraft must be mastered individually, and its strengths and weaknesses must be understood in relation to each of the other planes' capabilities in order to have any success in combat. It will make a WW II scholar of you in short order.
Visuals - Everything is crisp, clean, and easily discernable from a distance. Successful dogfighting is aided by being able to quickly and easily observe the actions of your opponents, and the graphics allow this at very high resolutions with little performance loss.
Stability - The game has never crashed a single time on either of my systems. Similarly, the actual network coding appears to be very efficient as evidenced by a distinct lack of "warping" and lag effects in the game.
Community - The price point of $29 monthly appears to be just right. The game avoids punishing pay-by-the-hour subscribers for their enjoyment of the sim, and the slightly higher than average price ensures that only mature individuals with a genuine interest and dedication to the simulation are present. Everyone appears to be equally helpful and knowledgeable, and even a quick read of the Hi-Tech Creations message forums can be quite an educational experience for the WW II aviation enthusiast.
Free 8-player head-2-head play - Also new in 1.02 is the ability to host an 8-player game for free. This is also useful for squad training and grudge settling, away from the main arena.
THE BAD
Too much detail? The flight model is indeed superbly effective at inducing a sense of realism, but it may be just a touch too much for some players. The constant need to trim the aircraft -- and I mean constant -- can become annoying, especially if you aren't lucky enough to have a programmable joystick to assign this function to a hat switch. I do, but it still bugs me. However, I can easily forgive this, owing to the realistic feel it adds to the already great flight model. At least the workload is the same for all participants.
Super tough opponents - That community of helpful and knowledgeable folks that we love so much will blow you away in a split second if you fumble the dogfight even the slightest bit. They are tough and I can see some less hardcore or skilled players potentially getting frustrated at having their wings clipped off constantly.
Spoiled - I'm ruined for enjoying other flight sims. I keep trying to play EAW and WW2 Fighters, but find myself going back to Aces High because they just don't provide the same thrill anymore. Darn.
The game is free for a two-week trial. If you have any interest at all in flying an online WW II sim -- and you wouldn't have read this far if not -- then go try it out. There's nothing to lose, except potentially becoming completely addicted to the thing, and at 7Mb, the download itself is relatively painless.
