JenningsGary

I will preface the following with the fact that I have just started messing with this sim and there may be things I have not quite figured out or missed in the cursory reading of the manual and tutorials I have viewed. That being said I really wanted to like this game and it had been on my wish list for quite a while. From the onset it looked to combine the best of the Harpoon and Janes Fleet Command series while adding a touch of depth and realism both those simulations lacked. My overall experience in just the few hours I have been trying to wrap my head around the interface is it just the opposite. It seems to be lacking in some crucial areas. For a game that requires one to meticulously plot out every waypoint for an air asset (lest you be condemned to micromanage and entire air war) it is quite frustrating that I cannot group aircraft and load mission sets without getting them airborne first. Basically, in a sim attempting this scope of realism I should have the ability to input an entire Op-Order broken into an individual Frag Order for each unit before they even leave the ground. Beyond that the friendly AI is absolutely stupid without the aforementioned micromanagement and the ability to adjust them on the fly is cumbersome, especially if you have multiple aircraft converging on hostile airspace. The editors claim an intuitive GUI and I hate to say that it cannot be further from the truth. A miss-click here or a fat finger there and something you have spent the last several minutes or even hours trying organize and execute takes a horrible turn for the worst. I again attribute this to the unintuitive interface and the stupid AI. To be quite honest, the designers could take a page from Falcon 4.0s real-time dynamic campaign map as the ability to edit strike packages, target sets and mission loadouts was actually quite intuitive and in many ways had the same meticulous attention to detail and threat modeling Command wishes to challenge the player with. I have yet to mess with the naval component though I am concerned I will encounter many of the frustrations I am experiencing with the air assets. I am hoping that this review is pre-mature and most of my gripes are coming from unfamiliarity as I see a lot of potential in this program and am excited to see if the developers will continue to improve on this platform but as of right now it just seems cumbersome and unpolished.