Birds of Prey

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Birds of Prey is a fairly complex combat flight simulator by Argonaut Software, featuring a lot of different planes and missions. It offers the stunning selection of 40 aircraft to fly (!). The game is focused on a real time campaign environment on a fictitious map, with two sides taking part, Side A (Blue), composed of Western aircraft (resembling NATO), and Side B (Red), composed of Eastern aircraft. The depicted game's map is fictitious, but it's strategically interesting, with 3 airbases for each Side, and one aircraft carrier plus several useful ground facilities like factories, power-plants, radar stations, cities. You can pick a mission and get into the cockpit of just about anything going, for either side. You can mount attacks on ships, factories, and tank battalions. And yes, you may also drop supplies from your Hercules, or strafe an area with the A-10's big gun or refuel in mid air (!), a feature that was introduced for the first time on flight sims! More on these note that the Amiga version contained a breathtaking intro that is sadly completely missing in the PC version of the game.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
Speaking about the wonderful intro only on the Amiga version, is showing two F-16 entering a dogfight with 2 MiG-29 all flying supersonic close to ray-traced mountains and terrains. And everything moves fast and smoothly animated! We've all seen such impressive introductions on the Amiga systems in various games, such as Blood Money, The Killing Game Show and lots more! Well, the in-game graphics in Birds of Prey are good for their time, above average in fact, but the landscape graphics are not as detailed as I was expecting. Not bad though at all, having quite smooth 3D motion and aircraft animations (moving wings for the F-111, Tornado, F-14 etc). Also the aircraft armament is visible, a feature missing on all combat flight simulators of its time. There no huge differences between the Amiga and the PC version (running in VGA graphics) in terms of graphics , except a few more colors for the PC and a bit faster scrolling in the full-3D environments during flight. But both versions look and play equally good I think! The sound is pretty good too, with various nicely digitized sound effects (excellent jet engine sounds etc). You can even hear the enemy missiles flying past you, it's very impressive!