Hornet Leader - demo

Total score
Game play
Nuts & bolts
Bells & whistles	N/A

Any game about modern air combat that isn't a flight simulator is something I'm going to be very interested in, but let me put my cards on the table straight up, sooner rather than later that game's going to have to be compared to Flight Commander 2, a game still on my hard drive after many, many years that so far has been king of this particular gaming hill.  That's probably not very fair on the new game as the bar has been set pretty high, and that's also probably one reason why the market isn't flooded with this sort of game, but that's the state of play.

So I was interested.  Right up until I saw the first screen shot of Hornet Leader, when my reaction was "you've got to be kidding".  (With slightly more words not fit for general publication).  Clearly this was not going to go well.

Game play

In Hornet Leader the player assumes the role of what I suppose is a squadron leader crossed with a fighter controller, assigning pilots to missions and weapons to aircraft; then aircraft to abstract areas surrounding a target while selecting low or high altitude for each plane, and whether to dodge incoming missiles -- wouldn't the answer to that always be yes? -- and what target to shoot at with which weapon.

Taken in isolation this isn't a bad idea for a game, and by all accounts it makes for quite a good card game, but is it really better than FC2 at covering broadly the same topic?  Clearly not. Hornet Leader's a fairly slim game about one type of aircraft from one country flying missions so abstract that they all seemed identical to me, so it's not difficult to compare it to FC2, a game about pretty much every plane that flew postwar from every air force imaginable.

On top of that I think in porting this game to the computer something very important was lost in translation.  Maybe the card game (which I haven't played) relies on the fun that comes out of almost any card game situation: the human player sitting across the card table, with hazing and banter and ... well, just the fun of one on one gaming.  I can't imagine what else it could be.

The level of abstraction is just too high to get all that involved.  It could be argued that if whatever slightly abstract individual the player is meant to be isn't that involved in combat, then the player shouldn't be either.  But that leaves a very important question begging.  What is the fun & exciting thing the player's avatar is meant to be doing that would make this an fun & exciting situation to play?  In FC2 it's maneuvering in for a kill, what's it meant to be here?  Picking weapon loads?

If the point of this game is meant to be the tense seconds and minutes of aerial combat then why make that part so abstract, because abstracting that out doesn't leave very much.  Click yes to avoid the missiles (yes! always!) and click the target that seems the most opportune.  Click, click, click.  My level of disengagement couldn't have been higher.  Possibly this would make for a great simulation of being a Hornet Leader of a squadron of anonymous pilots that I didn't like very much, but that's not much of a game.  Zero points for game play.

Nuts & bolts

Flight Commander 2 runs just fine on Vista in compatibility mode, but amazingly the same tweak's required of Hornet Leader, even though it came out after Vista had already been released for half a year or more.  And don't even think about running the game on most laptops or budget wide screen monitors, as the game only runs at the one fixed resolution.  Sigh.  Just which aspect of the graphics in the game demanded a fixed resolution isn't clear, and to say the game's already received plenty of FLAK over this is an understatement (and yes, another very bad pun).  My desktop monitor coped with the resolution, but there was a disconcerting moment of screen flicker for pretty much any movement or redraw on screen.  My laptop didn't cope at all.

Barely adequate in the nuts and bolts category.  Not nasty apart from the screen resolution issue, but not quite nice enough either, even if that was to be fixed.  Zero points for nuts & bolts.

In conclusion

Clearly the reign of FC2 will last a little while longer.

Hornet Leader's had a more wide reaching impact for me too.  I've been looking forward to a computer version of Empires in Arms since before I owned a computer, and Matrix has it slated for release later this year ... but after Hornet Leader's example of the perils of porting a game that seems to rely a lot for its fun value on having face to face interaction, and after Guns of August's example of just how very annoying a very old fashioned computer interface can be, I just don't think I'm looking forward to computer Empires in Arms any more.  Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised, but the screenshots don't offer much hope.  Napoleon's Campaigns on the other hand, now that's  a different story.