Ok, first the good news; it’s your very own, all-American, shiny, four engined WW2 bomber, bristling with more guns than a rednecks’ barbecue and packing enough ordnance to kick Adolf’s sweet ass and get change. The bad news… you can’t bomb or shoot anything. Booooo.

To be honest, it always feels a bit weird flying military aircraft in flight simulator, be they modern fighter jets or old warbirds because, sooner or later, once you’ve got to grips with the flight model and challenges of getting it in the air, beaten up the field a few times, you want to, well, how can I put this...? UNLEASH HELL!!! Drop bombs, fire the guns, see if you can nurse it home on one engine and ½ a wing, generally do heroic stuff. But FS, being a very gentlemanly affair, isn’t really cut out for that sort of loutish behaviour and would far rather you quietly filed your flight plan and tootled off in a sedate fashion, observing correct flight rules of course m’lad. Fine in a Cessna or Boeing 737, but a bomber is designed to, well, bomb and after a while, just flying around to no particular purpose feels a bit sterile. Bit like being in the Swiss Air Force, I imagine.

I did surprisingly have some fun with this old bird despite being unable to satisfy my warmongering instincts. I tried limping her back home with 1 then 2 then 3 engines gone (bit of an engine fire effect would have been nice, but nooooo...) to recreate what the real guys must have had to go through and ended up as a very big lawn dart on more than one occasion.

It’s all perfectly fine and everything works, it’s just all a bit dull really, and for the price, there are better kites to fly out there. Yet if military birds are your thing, and in particular if the B-24 is one of your favourites, you might want to take a look. Anyway, one day Microsoft will hopefully put the ‘combat’ element back into flight simulator and then we’ll have some fun!