REAL aileron/elevator control. Nice graphics, Good game play, shallow story, nice selection of aircraft, few MP modes.
The good stuff: REAL AIRCRAFT CONTROLS. I started playing on expert and was very pleasantly surprised to see that the player has aileron and elevator controls on the left stick. Too many flight games only have a "left / right / up / down" arcade mode. This has honest " roll / pitch / yaw" control in expert mode... yeehaw!! GRAPHICS... the airplane graphics are beautiful in HD. The ground is good, but not nearly as refined as the aircraft. SOUND... very good Dolby Digital 5.1 support. SP MISSIONS: single player missions consist of you gaining access to an area of confict (far east, middle east etc..) then you as the gamer, gets to pick from a list of missions what you want to fly when. The voice acting blows and the story line is shallow. MP MISSIONS: only 2 mission types here. all consist of dogfighting. This is a blast to play online 4 on 4 teams, but I wish they had more variety of game types like the FPS games. GAMEPLAY: The actual game play is quite fun. You start with an F-14, and as you complete missions you gain access to newer / better aircraft. I now have access to F-14, F-16 and A-10. Missions have both air and ground components. Shooting heli's down in a A-10 is fun. The 2 radars you have take some gettin gused to.. They do NOT automatically pick up all targets. You have to "look" for targets and the radar blips come and go. ANNOYANCES: by default, they want you to replay your mission on the built in VCR feature...which means you always have to press more buttons to just move on. You can save after every mission and it forces you to press even more buttons... frustrating. The manual does a poor job of describing the radar lines and features. Had to figure out the home vector and wingman vector by myself.
The explosions are nice, but do not show the plane blowing apart, they tend to atomize. TIPS: When you take off, you can not shoot anything because you are in NAV mode, hit the Y button to cycle through weapons. By default, you're in cockpit view when you start, click the right thumbstick to cycle through views.
OVERALL: 8/10. If you love simulator type flying games, buy it, if they're just mildly interest you, wait for a price drop.