U.S. Navy Fighters Gold comes with U.S. Navy Fighters, as well as the Marine Fighters update. This gives you a total of 8 aircraft to dogfight in. If you are looking for a solid flight simulator, U.S. Navy Fighters Gold is a good place to turn. While it does not share the same exciting graphics as some of the other simulators on the market, the graphics are clean, and the planes detailed. Attention to detail is very apparent in the life-like control of the different planes featured. The game comes with an extremely high hardware price tag, however. I would not recommend it to anyone running less than a Pentium-90. Although they claim that the game will run 486-DX33 I found this to be a very loose term "run." To actually play the game with a high enough frame rate to get near the realism that this game strives for a P90 and a PCI video card is a must. The game does support the Thrustmaster series joysticks, but does not have any support for the Virtual IO glasses. Overall this title is very solid, but not a one of a kind.
The hardware specs on the back of the box are absolute bare minimum to get the game to boot up. I would not recommend this game to anyone with a 486dx2 system or slower. For the level of graphics that the game showed, I expected a lower set of hardware requirements. This game does support the Windows95 CD autoload function, although it will not run under Windows95 except in MS-DOS mode. The game would also not run under OS/2, or any odd Dos memory configurement. I would recommend a clean dos boot disk for this title.
A solid flight sim for anyone looking to kill some time. The game stands on a plateu it created for itself during the release of the first edition in 1994. However, the Gold edition does not bring as many new features into the mix as I would have liked. Tighter game play, smoother graphics, and cleaner sounds were all improvements that I hoped that the gold edition would deliver -- but didn't. If you have not played through the first game at all, and a simulator fan, than this game is worth the extra money as compared to Navy Fighters. However, for anyone who did not take a liking to the first one, the Gold edition does not have enough new features to change many opionions.
Graphics : 17/25
The graphics of the airships are very detailed, although the graphics were somewhat choppy even on our P90 systems. I hoped for more improvements over the original.
Gameplay : 21/25
U.S. Navy Fighters Gold takes its gameplay heritage from the original in '94, and continues the tradition with new ships. Support for some of the new peripheral hardware like Virutal IO glasses would be a welcome addition.
Longetivity : 16/25
After playing through the first Navy Fighters, this sequal added very little for me. A newcommer would find this game far more intriguing than any veteran.
Compatibility : 15/25
The hardware requirements seem to be too steep on this title. Only our fastest systems could play the game with all of its features, and they even stumbled at times. Lack of OS/2 and Windows95 dos box compatibility did not help either. Don't expect all your high-tech accesories to work either, only a limited selection of peripherals are supported.
Graphics : 17/25