Well the 3d support is here in all its glory, always assuming you have a 3DFX card but it's concerning the graphics that I have what might, in the right light, be considered to be almost a gripe with Longbow 2.
Perhaps the thing that got most Longbow fans excited when news of Longbow 2 first emerged was the fact that Andy Hollis and Co. It's like a morsel of meat tossed to the arcade crowd. While this is a good laugh, it doesn't seem to really fit in with the rest of the game somehow. When flying the Blackhawk, you can if you wish opt to take over the role of one of the door gunners and blast away at the passing scenery while the autopilot gets on with the task of flying the chopper. If you want to keep your crew chief happy, don't engage autohover because invariably when you do, the autopilot whacks the collective right up and sets these lights glowing like Christmas trees. The Blackhawk for instance features three indicator lights designed to show when you have overstressed the engine. There's a couple of slight funnies about flying the choppers. It may just be the long hours I spent playing the original Longbow coming into play but I still find the Apache the most satisfying to fly. The Kiowa by contrast is skittish and needs a firm hand to point it in the direction you want to go. The Blackhawk as befits a flying Transit van has a stolid flight model and is a breeze to fly. The different helicopters have subtly different flight models. For instance the Kiowa features a rudimentary HUD to replace the IHADDS display of the Longbow and the Black hawk has no HUD at all meaning that the pilot has to depend on the analogue gauges. These fine craft lack a few of the comforts the Longbow pilot has come to expect. Also available is the Bell Kiowa Warrior, a military version of the Jetranger used mostly for recon and fitted with a mast mounted sight for peeping from behind the scenery and the Sikorsky Blackhawk, a utility helicopter used for supply and inserting troops. In the new game, the A model Apache with its host of mechanical instruments has gone but to replace it, we have two versions of the Longbow, one with the microwave radar, one without. Did it offer enough improvements over the first game to justify its purchase? I have since come to the conclusion that the answer is an undoubted yes. In fact, when I first started playing Longbow 2, I had my doubts about it. The keys are the same, the handling is the same and the use of all the Longbow's complicated sensor are the same. People familiar with the first Longbow game will be instantly at home in the cockpit of the Apache since practically nothing has changed in it (There is one new MFD display, mostly to aid in multiplay). The first thing to realise about longbow 2 is that it is not an all new product. Think I'm going over the top? Lets take a look at exactly what you get in Longbow 2. Longbow2 is everything they hoped it would be. For once their salivary glands have not worked overtime in vain.
Ever since Andy Hollis announced that his team were working on an update to Longbow which would include most the things the fans of the original game had clamoured for such as 3d accelerated graphics, a proper dynamic campaign and multiplayer capability, the flight sim newsgroups have been awash with the drool of thousands of flight sim fans. There can rarely have been a sim so anticipated as this one.