Falcon 4.0

Game needed for Falcon BMS Mod (even though the usage of original code is supposedly limited?) Negative review because raising the price of a 1998 game not worth a cent today JUST because of a free mod is scummy asf and Microprose can kiss my ass!

randomly raising the price on a nearly 30 year old game is pretty lame, the BMS devs are the only ones even doing anything with Falcon 4

Bit of a ♥♥♥♥ move to increase the price because an independent dev is creating a mod for it, but still. £13 is NOT a bad price for what BMS 4.38 gives you. Positive review for the mod, not the game.

Quick fire up just to remind myself of what this game is. I have no nostalgic connections to 4.0. This reminded me that I had only played, back in the day, what is currently listed on Steam as Falcon Gold, and not 4.0. Functions well enough with my old Thrustmaster 16000M stick. It flies well for a pre-hardcore-realism era of fighter sims. While I was able to get the game to run smoothly, quitting to desktop resulted in a critical crash that could not be acknowledged or dismissed without having to enter the Windows taskmanager to force kill the client. It also has a very strange performance issue in fixed cockpit mode with massive frame drops, while every other camera view was buttery smooth. That crash and the frame rate issue are signs that nothing has been done to improve modern hardware performance for this game... which is telling as to the price hike. Is this worth $22 AUD? Considering it was possible to pickup the entire Falcon collection a few years ago for something stupidly cheap like $2 AUD (which is what I paid for it).... the answer is NO !!! I tried firing this up with the latest full conversion BMS mod (the core game is ultimately unnecessary beyond licensing concerns) and you will see why the price was hiked. Yet another example of trying to gouge the hardcore sim community unjustly. Other reviews that mention the price hike in relation to BMS are 100% accurate. The BMS mod is effectively the same core game just with a modern graphics engine, infinitely more detailed terrain and models, native high resolution/frame rate support, and better everything... BUT, it does have its own quirks, bugs, and flaws. The BMS mod is extremely impressive on the part of the creators, but it is not as monumental a "game upgrade" experience as say the Il-2 Sturmovik SAS mega mod. Don't buy into this thinking that the mod will extend the core game to the degree that SAS does with Il-2. The base Falcon 4.0 game is very focused on a very narrow theatre of war (Korea) and on F15 and F16 fighters. That focus is really good for a dedicated set of scenarios, but again... $20 AUD worth of nostalgia and mod dependence compared to what is standard 20+ years on? BMS is worth checking out if you are a hardcore supporter of community modders, or an F16 fanatic that must experience every gaming instance that features this particular fighter. And if money from the increased price tag were going to the modders... I would say yes, it is absolutely worth paying and supporting... but zero $$ is going in that direction. If you are purely interested in fighter combat that is fast, technical-enough and within an immersive engine that runs smoothly on somewhat modest hardware while also NOT being obsessively realistic like DCS... spend your time and hard earned cash on Project Wingman instead.

The original game here on Steam is really slow on my modern pc no idea why its a slide show. Used to run this game very well years and years ago on much older computers. The original Falcon 4.0 I believe was the ultimate F16 simulation with a fantastic dynamic campaign to fly the plane in once you learned it. The dynamic campaign is what this game was all about. A simulated war was modelled with AI air and ground units carrying out their own missions, with the front line moving in relation to the progress of the war. In Falcon 4.0 you took over a pilot in a squadron and flew missions. If you got shot down you carried on with a new pilot so the war still progressed. You only ended the game if you lost all the planes / pilots in your squadron. The flight modelling was significant. Proper avionics, communications, air to air refuelling, weapons employment and flight systems are modelled. Flight dynamics were realistically portrayed. But the original game was not for the casual simmer. It took a lot of time to learn the systems and then to learn how to fly the plane in a warzone. The systems were complex and there were many many different types of defences, planes, weapons, etc to be aware of. If you managed to get through all that the game you played was one of the best flight sims ever made. There were simpler options as well but you still had to learn the systems fairly well. So onto the current BMS version (v4.38): Really the only reason to get this old game on Steam today is to patch it to the current BMS standard. But it then becomes a very very complex ' study sim'. I mean Falcon 4.0 was always complex, but BMS have developed the sim to an altogether different level. It is now no longer a game really, it is a full 'study sim' aklong the lines of the aircraft in DCS, and imo all the worse for it. So either you learn the real F16 systems or you don't play the game. From that point of view BMS have been unflinchingly brutal in their development of an already complex game. Graphics are reasonably on par with modern flight sims now. Explosions and smoke look a bit dated but the terrain looks remarkable now, the cockpits look amazing, and it all looks fairly photo-realistic. Not as good as DCS looks but it is almost there. Because this game is used mostly to run the BMS patch, which runs outside of Steam, Steam overlay doesn't work - although there is a way you can do this using command line code: Install Falcon 4.0 normally Open the Properties for it on Steam Enter "[Path to Falcon BMS]\Launcher\FalconBMS_Alternative_Launcher.exe" %command% Which for me is: "G\Falcon BMS\Launcher\FalconBMS_Alternative_Launcher.exe" %command% into the Launch Options field Launch through Steam Then you can save screenshots, use the Steam overlay in the game, get trading cards, and Steam records your playtime. Overall I cant say I really like the BMS version. They have taken a complex sim, that was fun once you learned it, and turned it into a load of hastle and hardwork. There are a million buttons, you have to follow the correct procedures for everything, and you know this isn't fun for me. I loved the original game but this BMS is not enjoyable. Apart from Falcon 4.0 I preferred lighter flights sims. What I've always wanted is for someone to remake either DiDs EF2000, F22 Total War War, or DIs Tornado. In those games you could get into them quickly, and enjoy flying a fairly realistic plane in a dynamic war. They were all fantastic 'light sim' games I played years before Falcon 4.0 came out in 1998. I still believe there is a strong market for lighter sims. We older pc pilots need more than just study sims and arcade War Thunder / Nuclear Option games. There is space for something in between. I see Microprose are creating some lighter sims now which is great news. A remaster of F22 ADF is due out this week. Possibly even F22 Total Air War or EF2000 in the future. Combat Air Patrol 2 also being developed. These are the sorts of flight sims I loved in the 90s and I still want to play them. Falcon 4.0 was the limit of what I could enjoy and BMS have pushed it over the limit. So I can't recommend this game anymore in good faith.

I have played this game a lot in BMS - This game has what should be standard today. Campaign that envolves on it own by your success and failures and the fails and success of NPCs both friendly and enemy, the campaign is basically like a RTS on a grand scale where you influence the outcome as much as the AI. This is what games today should be. 10/10

Scummy price increase. But I guess anything so that the BMS team can develop in peace. Get this game for BMS BMS: 10/10

Who's Sam, and why is he always shooting missiles at me? Anyway, this is an exceptionally good sim considering it was released in 1998, back when I was still living in my dad's parachute bag. It has an impressive dynamic campaign and probably still has better AI aircraft than those donkeys at ED have at the time I'm drunkenly excreting this review (2025). I personally needed counseling after my first encounter with a MiG-23 piloted by a starving North Korean guy named Kim. This is a really good classic sim if you're into the old-school stuff, but if you're like me, you probably bought Falcon 4.0 for licensing purposes so you can play Falcon BMS, which I highly recommend as well. I rate this sim [b]9[/b] AMRAAMs out of [b]10[/b].

If falcon 5.0 isn't better than the BMS mod imma be upset.

playing on steamdeck i like using cockpit theirs mods to make it better then dcs def worth it even for the vanilla expirence,very in depth for a 1998 game tbh