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We don't know when we last had the kind of anticipation in a flight simulation that has shadowed Lock On: Modern Air Combat, slowly building up over its fairly long development period. Possibly Falcon 4 caused as much excitement, maybe even more, but that was released when flight sims were in their prime. There has almost been a feeling about LOMAC, that in today's market, this ambitious project is the last great hope for a genre of gaming that has seen better days. Developed by Russian design group Eagle Dynamics, who created the excellent Flanker 1.0 and Flanker 2.0 sims, the pedigree is undoubted, and with UbiSoft publishing, who did such a great job with IL-2 Sturmovik, hopes and expectations have been justifiably high.

LOMAC is probably best thought of as a sequel rather than a brand new sim. Being based on the highly regarded Flanker 2.0 (later 2.5), the foundations were already laid. The desired outcome was much bolder. Take the Russian fighters from Flanker 2.5, the Sukhoi SU-27 and SU-33, and the Mig 29, update them and make them more realistic, and then add the ground pounding SU-25 Frogfoot and it's naval counterpart the SU-39. On top of that include the American F-15 Eagle and the "Ugly but well hung" A-10 Thunderbolt. Then add a dynamic campaign based in the Black Sea region, specifically the Crimean Peninsula, and improve on an already very impressive mission builder and wrap it all up in the best graphics DirectX 8 could buy. You bet sim-philles all around the world were chomping at the bit to get a taste of LOMAC. Over the course of development though Lomac ended up being delayed nearly 2 years, and it lost some of its desired components due to a number of reasons. The dynamic campaign and the naval SU-39 were dropped. Deadlines were reshuffled but most of the sim community were happy to wait, preferring that LOMAC be done right, rather than quickly. Time has come for LOMAC to be judged, and you can't ask for a harsher audience than the sim crowd.

LOMAC installs very easily, as one would expect. The main menu is well done and mood setting with what sounds like real life fighter plane coms playing, and takes you to one of a number of different areas of the game. You can also take one of the planes for a quick flight against passive targets from here, but delve into the options and you find yourself in the midst of a gorgeous collection of confusing buttons and menus with nothing in the documentation to explain it all. It's then left to trial and error on the players part to figure out which does what. In a simpler game, that might be fine but LOMAC is anything but simple. The manual is around 130 pages of PDF formatted information about the aircraft and how to fly them and use the systems each has. It also explains the weapons available to you in game, covers basic flight manoeuvres and has tips on how to survive the hostile world. The problem here is that some of the things in the manual, never made it into the game. Things like some of the radar modes explained in the manual just do not exist in the game. One welcome, but brief section, is all about weapon delivery. This is an often-overlooked necessity when dealing with the range of modern weapons used. Unfortunately, while it does tell us "how to", it doesn't cover the equally important "when to" or "when not to". We're sure simmers all around the world would be shedding a silent tear at the demise of the once mandatory encyclopaedic manual. One simple tip though. Go into your LOMAC folder and check out the ReadMe doc. It has 5 pages of errata to the manual, and another 6 pages of troubleshooting tips.

LOMAC ships with 8 highly detailed flyable planes. The Mig 29 has a western variant of the A model and Russian A and C models, so while it may be one aircraft, there are differences in all three models. The SU-33 is the only plane capable of carrier operations that is included in the game. None of the planes have any form of Air-to-ground radar modelled which is true to reality, though most planes have at least some ability to drop bombs, but the specialists in this area are the A-10 and the SU-25. Both are heavily armoured, subsonic aircraft that are able to carry a huge payload of weapons. The other aircraft deal mainly with Air-to-Air combat. All the Russian aircraft carry a similar avionics suite, although they do differ in ability. America's contribution to the A2A arena has a fairly comprehensive avionics package, but like the Russian planes, has had some radar modes removed from the game. Casual players won't mind, purists will but will probably grin and bare it in the hope that future add-ons correct these omissions. Since the manual isn't the greatest of help, there are in-game tutorials for most of the planes. These "missions" where you sit back and let the computer tell you what to do before you try it yourself can be just as effective, if not more so, as a decent manual, and these ones do a great job. Whatever plane you decide to try and master first, we implore you to sit through all the training missions at least once, especially in the case of the SU-25 which is about as bare-bones as they come in terms of electrical aids to help you deliver your payload. It doesn't even have a HUD, instead the training missions teach you how to use the simple WWII style gun sight to devastating effect.

The other ways to get into the air are by the awesome Fast Battle Planner, a very quick and simple mission builder that will immediately put you into the thick of action. Choose a plane, choose an enemy, set-up the different variables like time of day and weather or allow the program to randomly select these for you and click FLY. We should mention here that like the mission builder, you can select non-flyable planes only, and then when you start the mission, you become a spectator, watching the AI do their thing. Once you exit the FBP mission, you have the option of saving the mission to either replay it later on, or use the full mission editor to change it. There are 20 single missions to play, and a further 10 for multiplayer games, either co-op or head to head. We didn't have a chance to test multiplayer, but keep an eye out for our special LOMAC-Multiplay feature in the future.

The last flight arena is the campaigns. There are only four of them, for the F-15, A-10, the SU-27 and the SU-25 and they are scripted scenarios, requiring you to pass each mission before continuing onto the next. The missions themselves are pretty good, if a little void of non-mission related AI units, which doesn't help with what we think is the main problem with the campaigns. They are somewhat uninvolving. Great sims have an element of role playing built in, even if this role playing is implied and left to the imagination of the player, there will at least be something to spark the imagination. In LOMAC you really have to force yourself to play the role of fighter pilot. We are not exactly sure why we felt this way. Each campaign has background information about the campaign and each mission you fly, and there is a pilot editor where you can keep track of your progress and you can even add own picture, but we just didn't get the feeling that we were part of something larger than just the mission we were playing, and therefore get the emotional reward of contributing to an overall battle effort. We couldn't even adjust our planes weapons prior to starting each mission, although we believe that is dependant on who designs the missions.

The campaign missions start out fairly easy but get hard quite quickly. After feeling quite chuffed about acing the first mission in the F-15 campaign, we were brought down to earth, literally, by an enemy flight of Migs that spanked us big time. In that sense the campaigns are challenging and there is fun to be had. For that reason, but more so because of the mission builder we are actually quite positive about the campaign system. The campaign/mission builder is one of LOMAC's strongest features, and one that will keep the sim installed on many a hard drive for some time. It really is a piece of work, and although like anything, it has a need to do things in a certain way, there are a ton of mission possibilities available because of it. Adding air, ground, or sea units is a fairly simple operation, as is creating their waypoints. Including things like random system failures opens so many avenues to the mission designer, the games encyclopaedia is available from this menu (handy), and you can alter almost any variable you can think of, time, weather and so on. It will take some time to learn to use the full potential of the mission builder due to the lack of documentation, but we cant wait for the results to flow from the many talented designers out there.

We do have one complaint, well it's more of a suggestion really. We are not convinced of the replay-ability of the missions in LOMAC, mainly because we think the mission builder lacks enough options for random elements, yes you can add in random failures and make the AI strength random, but we would have loved to have seen a probability slider of enemy or friendly units appearing. We think it would have made the mission builder complete.

Now we have covered all of that, lets look at what this sim is really like once you strap yourself into your comfy home-pit and take to the air. One word. AWESOME! LOMAC has without a doubt the best sensation of flight we have experienced in a jet combat sim. It absolutely rocks, and there are a number of factors in this. Graphically at its best settings, LOMAC is jaw dropping. At its worst it looks like an improvement on Flanker 2.5, which is no slouch in the graphic department. The terrain is the best we have seen in any flight sim, bar none. The lads over at Eagle Dynamics have obviously put in a huge amount of time getting the entire environment right and it has paid off. Cities look great and are representations of the real cities and towns of the Crimea. Airfields are beautifully rendered with hardened shelters you can taxi into, and various service vehicles and static planes all over them, clouds are magnificent and the water, well we are running low on superlatives.