I've had First Eagles 2 for a while and never played it much just dabbled in the missions a few times. But whilst I am waiting for my CFS3 game to appear so I can start my Wings Over Flanders Fields game I have been playing a campaign in FE2 and what a great little game it is!

Just played a mission where four of my Spads met a loads of enemy Fokkers VIIs and the battle was amazing! Watching planes colliding into each other, seeing some great skins one a bright red was a new sight, then running into a couple of Aces. There really is a lot of immersion in this game.

I also like the way the front line is marked and moves in line with how the ground offensive is going on.

It looks great as well with a couple of the better mods and not only that its plays pretty fast - I have only noticed a tiny bit of slowdown whilst in a massive furball but it was very limited, most of the time the game plays really smoothly.

And have to say the way the padlocking works is really well done as well.

The missions are rather samey (I suppose they were in that war!) and its a shame the campaign ends when you die. That means to continue you have to refly the same mission again and not die the next time or start the whole campaign from scratch. In fact this is the very reason I am turning to WOFF.

Its interesting to see ground battles going on between tanks whilst you are flying. Takes me back to my Falcon4 days where I loved looking around the battlefields. Not quite on the scale of that game here but interesting attempt just the same. Shame you cant see the troops going over the top though. But that would require some serious processing power!

Flak is really well done and suitably scary as well - it really sounds and looks brutal and if you fly straight too long near it you certainly will regret it.

Also I have to say the immersion whilst out of the flying itself is not great - a series of text screens do not greatly immerse you in playing the game.

Also how can you manage to land with practically no wings? And most planes seem to manage to land after being shot and losing their engines etc - I cant imagine that sort of thing really happened in real life! Surely you cannot land a plane with only 3m long wings! So I feel the flight modelling is a little off.

And the Spads seem to take loads and loads of damage!

Its a shame the campaigns are quite limited in number - four all set in 1917/18. I would love to try the Fokker Scourge and other earlier periods of the war. But what there is is pretty varied, you can play for any of the four major combatants of the Western Front.

A thing I really like though is the way you can follow the pilots of your squadron seeing how they do, how they improve/die/get wounded etc. The fact that I have only about 8 able pilots left in my squadron is a little disconcerting mind.

Overall its a fantastic sim, especially for the price, with some great mods available, and its brilliant for picking up and flying the odd mission if you have only limited time. Its so simple to play, you can remember all the controls easily, yet still very immersive whilst flying - especially in the dogfights.