Look at all those buttons. XD
Introduction
For those of you who live under a rock, since the 1970's, the A-10 Thunderbolt II has been the primary attack plane of the USAF. Featuring heavy weapons and armor, this plane is designed to get in close, flying low and slow, destroying anything in it's path. Well, at least that's the idea. It's easier said than done.
First Impressions
Alright, so you just loaded up Digital Combat Simulator on your PC. You're sitting in the cockpit on the tarmac, wondering WTF you're supposed to do. Step 1: start the engines. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. This isn't Microsoft Flight Simulator, where you can simply push Ctrl + E, and viola. But seriously, how complicated can a simple startup procedure be? It's long enough that I'm not going to explain it. Some nice guy already did that, and it can be found here.
But that's if you're lucky. It took me over an hour just to figure out how to look around the cockpit so I could push all these buttons, like the tutorial told me to do. As you can imagine, I was probably getting frustrated. I mean, this is no fun, right? Who wants to push buttons all day, when you could be flying around killing things like in HAWX? Surely, this "game" must be a waste of $40, right?
Well, if you think that, you're wrong. I rented HAWX on the week it launched. I beat the game in two days, and played online for a third day, then returned the game. It was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last long. DCS is the exact opposite. At first, you're going to be frustrated and overwhelmed, but as you start to get the hang of it, it will become addicting.
Technical Stuff
At first, it's probably going to lag a little bit. I typically get about 20FPS on the ground, with the default settings. That sounds bad, but once I get up in the air, my frame rate picks up to 60, and it becomes smooth as butter.
The airplane itself is highly detailed, almost to the point where you can't tell it's computer generated. The textures have a high amount of detail, the lighting effects are spectacular, and the polygon count is who knows how high. The ground textures aren't all that great, although if you've played other flight simulators before, this is to be expected.
Also, this is a 64 bit simulator, although there is also a 32 bit version. While it's running, my memory usage is over 4GB, sometimes going beyond 5GB. It definitely benefits from having more than 4GB of RAM.
One of my biggest complaints, though, is loading times. You can't adjust any settings during flights, and you can't save your work in progress either. So, you're going to be spending a lot of time looking at that loading screen. But, as I said earlier, if you've played other flight sims before, this won't be too surprising. It wasn't unusual for me to be looking at the loading screen for a whole minute every time, although, since I moved the game to my SSD, it only takes about 10 seconds. It's something to keep in mind.
And now, for my rig, just to give you a general idea of performance. I have an AMD Phenom II x4 955, overclocked to 3.7GHz, 12GB DDR3 1333MHz, and an ATi Radeon HD 5770. While I can't max out the graphics, it mostly runs smooth and still looks excellent. A GTX 560Ti could probably max it out, I think. If not, a 570 could.
The developer, Eagle Dynamics, is known for supporting their products with patches and constant improvements. I've had the "game" for over 2 weeks now, and so far there's been a patch, adding in a life-saving, much needed tutorial explaining the HOTAS commands (and probably a lot more; I haven't read the patch notes). Expect them to support DCS, even after several years.
As for controls, I use a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro. Just about any joystick will work (I think), although you're going to need to do some control mapping. Let me tell you, it's a total pain in the butt.
Multiplayer
I have actually not tried the multiplayer yet. It's taken me all this time just to figure out how to drop a dumb bomb on a target, and I still don't know how to aim that nasty vulcan cannon. I am definitely not ready to deal with SAMs and AA guns yet, lol.
Final Thoughts
DCS is frustrating. It's confusing. Even if you've played flight sims before, it's still overwhelming. But be patient. It took me a whole day before I got off the ground. It took me 3 days before I could read the basic instruments and do some maneuvers. It took me a week before I could land successfully. After two whole weeks, I just learned how to lock on and fire a missile.
That kill was a hundred times more satisfying than destroying both the Arkbird and Megalith combined.
You will die a lot. But be patient. Take it one step at a time. But if it's too much for you, by all means, pick up Assault Horizon instead. I know I'll be attempting to master the A-10C for many months to come.
I'm thinking about uploading a gameplay video soon, hopefully then you'll be able to see just how truly complex this flight simulator is.
