The premise to this game is awesome: defend the U.S. from invading Chinese and soviet forces over San Francisco. How awesome would that be? With the myriad of wanna-be flight sims out there, I thought that Jet Fighter 4 would at least be something different. Sadly, I was wrong.
The problems are many. The first I had was making the game stable. Four out of the first five times I played the game my game crashed to desktop without the slightest warning. I uninstalled the game and tried again. This time the blue screen of death appeared. I was not happy. I had to change my video drivers to an unsupported version, reboot, uninstall the game, reinstall it, and only then was I able to play it.
At first I thought I could forgive this hour long excursion into frustration... but then I played the game. The flight model is laughable. I know that they wanted to make the game more accessible to beginners by simplifying much of the game, but the jets react ridiculously to commands. They jerk and fly around like what you'd think a UFO would do. Amazingly, they never come close to falling apart.
The camera also sucks. While there are several to choose from, the only truly workable camera for me was the default cockpit. The out-of-plane cameras are twitchy and require too much maintenance to work right.
The graphics are OK, but nothing spectacular. The clouds, backgrounds, and planes all look fine, but pretty much everything in the game has been seen before, or done better. While some special effects and explosions look nice, there is nothing to make the game stand out.
The missions are varied... but sometimes extremely hard. Flying around San Francisco isn't really all that fun... especially when hundreds of SAM sites are locked on to you. How in the HELL did anyone let these people install all of the SAM sites anyway?
In the end, someone who hasn't played any flight sims might find this fun. A small child with a joystick would likely have a blast tearing through the sky without a thought or care for one ounce of realism. I, for one, demand more out of a flight game. Jet Fighter 4 is a game that's plagued with problems, and never actually makes defending the USA fun.
-Jerred
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