F-22 Lightning 3 is a combat flight simulation game developed by NovaLogic and released in 1999. The game features six campaigns, with a total of 46 missions split between them (each campaign features either seven or eight missions, which must be played in order). The campaigns cover various hot spots around the world (Libya, Chad, Indonesia, Syria, the Kola Peninsula, and so forth), where the player is a member of the United States Air Force, flying the F-22 Raptor fighter jet. While NovaLogic attempted to develop a more legitimate accurate flight sim by acquiring official sanctioning from the F-22’s manufacturer Lockheed Martin, it still falls short of the level of realism obtained by other flights sims of the same era. That being said, if you look over F-22 Lightning 3, you are presented with NovaLogic’s modus operandi of being a game you could load, play, and shoot something in, with some nice explosions as your reward.
The game-play is fairly straightforward, easy-to-play, and a simple-to-get-into F-22 flight simulation, featuring good graphics and mission structure. Many of the controls are standard, often found across many of the previous NovaLogic offerings. They are, however, customizable for both keyboard and joystick if you want to change the games often weird key binds. Missions are objective- and waypoint-oriented, so you basically fly your route and attempt to accomplish the goal – blowing something up or shooting something down. Combat is also fairly simple. As soon as you are within range, directional cues and other indicators will tell you what it is and where it’s going. You have a variety of weapon types to play with: AMRAAMs, sidewinders, your 20mm Vulcan Gatling gun, HARMs, JDAMs, and various types of iron bombs. It even has a B61 10-kiloton tactical thermonuclear free-fall bomb.
Multiplayer is played on the NovaWorld servers with three different game modes: deathmatch, RAW, and cooperative. There is even options to use NovaLogics’ Voice-Over-Net technology, letting you communicate with each other using voice transmissions while flying.
Overall, this game is a typical NovaLogic game, just a simple down-and-dirty style that runs fantastically well even on old hardware and even better on the modern hardware today. It seems aimed at the casual gamer that has just a few minutes, to jump into a game and blow something up. I remember having the demo of this game when I was a kid and every chance that I had two or minutes I would sneak over to the computer and play, even when I was supposed to be working. I never had a manual for it so it took me awhile to figure out things out, and the nuclear bomb blast was absolutely impossible to escape. It was a great game for a younger kid such myself, and its still fun to play even as an adult.
