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> Results: F24 Stealth Fighter
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The ESRB Says
Mild Violence:GamerDad engaged in countless dogfights and strafing runs against low-resolution enemies. I am not a Trekkie, but I have been a fan of the series since reruns in the mid-70's and I have many quotes that I pull out from the original series and The Next Generation. One image that sometimes comes to mind is from the pilot of The Next Generation in which Q is putting the human race on trial using some fairly negative images, and Picard challenges him to look at things from a different perspective. I usually have that image come to me in relation to PC gaming and bugginess, but playing F-24: Stealth Fighter popped it into my head once again related to the Nintendo DS - and guess which side it was on? It is not that it is a terrible game, it is just that it could easily serve as an example of all that is wrong with the DS in terms of gaming. So while the score I give the game will lead you to think that it is an acceptable game at the right price, you will more than likely want to avoid this at all costs. The basic premise of the game is that you are a pilot tasked with keeping the peace in an increasingly volatile situation with Iran. (I must be playing too much Sam & Max, as all I can hear in my head now is "keeping the peace ... as violently as possible!") To do this you are assigned a series of twenty air and sea based missions on a fictional F24 fighter jet loaded up with tons of cool armaments, starting right away with a launch off of an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. The missions with pretty much the same feel - dogfight to clear the skies, then go in after the ground or water based targets. You can choose how much of the detail to manage yourself and how much to automate. This is the game that shows every technical deficiency of the system - the under-powered graphics, the limited audio system, the lack of full analog controls, and the impact of the screen size on the ability to use the bottom screen for precise controls. But the game is also a decent amount of simple fun. The developers went out of their way to make the battles lop-sided in your favor, so that the technical issues would never make you want to chuck the cartridge out the window. They made the controls flexible enough for just about anyone to find a method that suits them. With a few additional things and enhancements - a downloadable dogfight mode for game-sharing chief among them - the game would be recommendable as a budget pick. A longer set of missions with more variety would have been even better. But neither of these are there, so a single-player game lasting a few hours is what you get. You can certainly do worse, but you can even more easily do better. As it stands, the Q have won this round.  
The structure of the game tells you what to expect - impersonal dogfights and strafing runs. You are blowing other aircraft out of the sky and destroying ships and convoys, but you never see the people of feel the personal impact - they are all just low-resolution targets. Some argue that an impersonal look at such things is worse than realism, since it lulls you into a sense that there is no human loss associated with the actions. Regardless of your stance on this, I wanted to be clear that impersonal air combat is the sole source of any content in the game, and that you should use that to decide if it is content-appropriate for your child.
Other Platforms GBA: the visuals are squished into a single screen, and the touch-control option is gone, otherwise this is identical. Comments? Chat about it in our forums! Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: F24 Stealth Fighter |
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