Fighter Ace 2 was a massively multiplayer World War II flight sim that permitted over 300 players to pilot any of 34 planes. Planes are drawn from the German, British, American, Japanese and Russian sides. You had the chance to pilot over 40 planes, including the DeHavilland Mosquito, the F4U-4 Corsair, and the Zero. You could also customize your fuel, rockets, bombs, and more in a highly accurate combat simulation ( for the year 2000 that is). The focus of the game was determined by the arena. In the Free for All Arena, each player was out to get as many kills as possible. In the Team Based Conquest Arena, each of the five nationalities battled for territory and strategic position. It was played through MSN Gaming Zone but the servers are long gone.
While the full version of the game was online only, it contains an offline component for training, free flight and few other scenarios. Microsoft included the demo version of the game in few other products, namely Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002. It was an optional install you could choose while installing MSFS. There were three different difficulty levels: arcade, intermediate, and realistic. These range from very easy to fly, to quite difficult. Because the demo is offline only, the user had a number of options concerning flight physics and combat difficulty. Stalls, spins, engine torque, wind, and gun forces were some of the flight options that could be enabled or disabled. Ammo and fuel could be limited or unlimited. Views can be set to allow fullscreen, external views, or restricted to cockpit-only. Aircraft tags can be disabled, or customized to show any combination of different tags. The demo had practice missions that can be flown with AI controlled enemy and friendly aircraft, so you can get the feel of flying and gunnery without going online. Graphically, the aircraft are well-rendered. External ordnance is visible, and control surfaces can be seen to move. Damage is not visible unless it is catastrophic, like a missing wing or tail section.
Game sounds are pretty good also. Radial engines have a different sound than inline engines. Gun firing, rocket launch, and bomb explosion sounds are well done. Fighter Ace employs a 3D sound scheme – for instance, while in the cockpit and looking to left, the engine sounds appear to be coming from the right. When another aircraft flies up along side of you, you can hear which side it’s on without having to look. While the player is in full screen, a text readout of altitude, throttle, flaps, gear position, and airspeed. Any or all of six instruments can be configured to appear at the bottom of the screen. The aircraft themselves are built from dozens of systems, each one being able to take damage and enough damage of one system will cause others to fail. Control surfaces can be damaged, destroyed, or get stuck in one position, rendering your aircraft unflyable. Wings and tails can be shot off, engines can be destroyed, and your pilot can be knocked out or killed.
For the era, this game was incredibly detailed and realistic. I can remember having many hours of fun with this game. If paired with a joystick the training scenarios are highly entertaining, whether you play as realistic as possible or play like me, trying to ram your B-25 Mitchell bomber down the chimney of the enemy factory complex. eventually Microsoft brought out two more iterations of Fighter Ace; Fighter Ace 3 and Fighter Ace Deluxe Edition. All of them played on the Microsoft servers from 2000 to 2010 when Microsoft shut the servers down.
