The Final Word game review

IF-22 Raptor -- Interactive Magic

Tintagel
Recently I upgraded my pc to an AMD K-6 233MHz processor, changed motherboards and replaced my 64MB of clunky EDO DRAM with 128MB of fast SDRAM. Heavy on the RAM, light on the processor, but it's better than the other way around and it fits my budget (barely).

Anyhow, my upgrading made me remember several games which had been sitting around needing reviewed but were too clunky on my P-200MMX to be worth looking at. So just for kicks and giggles I yanked out IF-22 which had been a complete dog previously (I don't know if it was a hardware problem or what, but it sucked so much that you could hear the whooshing even with the speakers disconnected) and gave it a try.

Now, it's not as though my computer was too lame to run the game - it only calls for a midrange Pentium (MMX and 3-D card optional) with reasonable RAM (32MB I seem to recall). Needless to say, I was peeved that it was unplayable on my P-200 MMX w/64MB of EDO RAM and an ATI 3-D Rage Pro graphics card! The good news is that the MB, CPU and RAM upgrade has now allowed me to play the game smoothly in 640x480 with most effects turned on (IF-22 supports 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768 modes using DirectX).

I was fairly impressed with the terrain detail and the control options. From the point of view of being a "realistic simulation of the F-22 Raptor" I-Magic has done an admirable job. If you like combat flight sims and have plenty of computer muscle, this can be a neat game. However I have to blast I-Magic for releasing a game with such wildly inaccurate system requirements. I asked several other people who had similar power computers to mine to playtest the game and make sure my experience wasn't a fluke - it wasn't. Everybody reported the same poor gameplay on their Pentium MMX class machines.

In today's world of P-II and AMD K-6-2 w/3-D Now! I can give IF-22 a thumbs up to die hard flight sim fans, but you sure have to wonder about I-Magic's credibility on system requirements!

(12/98)