The following review is by Scott Driscoll AKA 'Trailape' of the (in)famous 8/12 Wargamers at Holsworthy. As he is presently somewhere in the Sinai chasing camels for amusement we thought we'd loot anything faintly useful from his site to help flesh out the mag a bit...Thanks Scott - mate! - "May all your camels be pretty ones" (an ancient Bedouin greeting) - Ed. I've been meaning to do a review of Microprose "European Air War" for some time now, but really didn't know how to go about it. So much has been said about this flight sim already, and I didn't want to go over the same ground again and again. So I thought I'd just do a game report of sorts and hope that would give the reader some idea of the feel of the game. So without further ado, let me take you back to Holland, November 14, 1944... "Maybe the Amerikaners will not come today" The words brought me back from my thoughts of schnapps and the Girls in Berlin. "Maybe they will hit another sector of the Front today?" "They will come Hans, don't worry about that" I assured my wingman. "ALARM, ALARM, Schnell schnell!" With that we dashed to our FW190's, the Americans had arrived. After getting airborne we headed north-west towards the coast. Soon the American bombers loomed into sight, B17F 's with late model P47's as escorts. I could see the Yankee fighters break away from their "Big friends" and dash down at us. The range closed and Red Flight let loose with their rockets. The first of the B17's broke up and fell, but the rest droned on. Closed the range on one of the Bombers in the lower flight, he filled my cockpit as I squeezed the trigger. I could see the many little explosions as the 20mm cannon shells struck home, and debris fly from my target. Soon the crew could be seen tumbling out of the stricken beast. All the time tracers from the other B17 were seen darting towards my aircraft, with the unpleasant "ping ping" of rounds nicking and hitting my fighter. Through the American formation I sped, downing yet another B17. Suddenly a P47 loomed in my sights. Twisting and turning we gradually lost altitude as we both fought for our lives. He was good this Yankee, but I was better. My rounds ripped into him. He was too low to punch out, and had to ride the "Jug" into the deck near a small clump of trees and a red brick house. His wingman arrived to late to help, and in his haste overshot me. He also felt the sting of my 20mm Cannons I found myself very low, & thought I would be pressed to get back into the fight, but as luck would have it a badly damaged B17 could be seen trailing smoke off to my left. I quickly closed on him and another Yankee bit the dust big style. This is a true account of a mission I just finished flying. EAW is without doubt the BEST WW2 flight sim available at the moment - and that is saying something when you look at the company it's in. Games like Jane's WW2 Fighters, Activision's Fighter Squadron (Screaming Demons Over Europe), & Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator are all great products, and I enjoy playing them all. But for my money EAW has a better all round feel to it. I must admit the Version 1.1 Patch does make a big difference to the graphics (it enables 3DFX), but even without this it still has an ever so slight edge over Jane's WW2 Fighters (Just!) The aircraft that you can fly are, ME109, FW190, ME262, ME110, Spitfire, Hurricane, Typhoon, Tempest, P51, P47, & P38. It is possible to fly Stukas also if you down load a patch from EAW Online. All the aircraft fly and handle true to form. There are heaps of other aircraft (non-flyable) also in EAW's skys, including B17's, B24's, He 111's, ME410's & JU88's to name but a few. I could ramble on forever about this truly brilliant sim, but I wont. Instead I suggest you visit the many sites on the web that are devoted to this sim and see what the rest of the world has to say, because I wanna climb into a Hurricane and down a few Hun over the Channel, "Tally Ho Chaps!". Final verdict. 9.5/10 Hard to fault. ***BREAKING NEWS!***... Now with the, "Enemy Coast Ahead!" patch available via EAW Online, you can now fly the following additional aircraft: JU88 (The Night Fighter version used to tear up the Allied Bombers), ME410, JU87 Stuka, Mosquito, & B26. Also you get new weapons to strap on to your new charges! And if that aint enough you can also download the great new sound pack also available via EAW Online. This sound pack takes the game to yet another level! I can't recommend these downloads enough. A must for anyone into EAW. "Get into it baby. YEAH BABY, YEAH!" Trailape And now the tech stuff for nerdy computer-types [Ed.] This review was done on a HP Pavilion 6306 System, using a AMD K6-2 CPU, 32 Meg Ram & 16 Meg PCI "Monster Fusion" 3D FX Card. Back to Table of Contents -- Kriegspieler #7 To Kriegspieler List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Kriegspieler Publications. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com