Falcon Benchmark Simulator
What is it?
Falcon BenchMark Simulator, the ultimate F-16 and dynamic war simulator for your groggy needs.
Falcon BMS is a fully clickable, extremely realistic, definitive simulation of the F-16 in various conflicts, with a full, immersive, emergent campaign that will proceed with or without you. Built on top of the now quarter-century old Falcon 4.0, BMS focuses on the F-16 — it is fully clickable, and most of its systems are accurately modeled. This might not be the easiest game to learn, but it has its rewards. With recent updates, it has also slowly started to expand beyond just the Viper, and it now offers the A-10 (A and C models), AV-8B (night attack and radar variant), F-4, F-15C and E, F/A-18, JA-37 Viggen, MiG-29, Mirage 2000, and Tornado as playable aircraft with dedicated cockpits and light models. They are not as thoroughly simulated, especially on the systems and avionics side, as the Viper, but with the breakthrough in coding done with BMS 4.37 where player aircraft no longer have to be F-16s in disguise, this will all improve over time.
This is nothing like propgames and World War 2 aerial warfare. You don't just fly this plane, you also dive head first into all the millions of buttons and complex computer systems. Falcon is a great simulator of warfare, but it is also a very able and very hard flight simulator. You click buttons in the cockpit. You plan strikes. You read up on radar warning tones. You learn about capabilities of air defence systems. You learn about all kinds of systems, tactics, procedures and concepts that will blow your mind in their complexity. You'll learn why piloting is such an awesome and glorified concept in our society. You could drown yourself into boatloads of manuals and guides to learn you to pilot this bird, and if you do, you can very likely operate an actual one on a basic level. If you need or want help, just ask. But don't just pop into mumble with "k, i wanna fly the F-16". You HAVE to be prepared to read, too.
It is also not like DCS, where there is certainly a bunch of reading and learning procedures, but where world outside of the aircraft in many cases is just decorative. BMS' (and Falcon 4.0 before it) claim to fame is its unprecedented and unrivalled dynamic campaign engine where what you do actually matters. You are a part of a flight with a specific role, part of a package with a specific objective, part of a strategical push to an end goal. If you waste planes and missiles, they will run out and you will no longer be able to project force, and then you lose. You have to actually communicate with AWACS and JSTARS and ATC, or you will be ambushed, or fire on the wrong target, or just collide in the air or on the runway, and again, you lose. The world is alive in a way that no other flight simulator offers and to an extent, you can even play BMS as an RTS, moving assets across the map and only rarely — if ever — step into the cockpit.
You don't just fly a single mission or a jumble of aircraft. You are in a 24/7 war.
Get going
Fragging a package, aka creating a flight and joining it.