Download TFX - Tactical Fighter eXperiment

For those who want a fun combat flight sim, this one is for you. Tactical Fighter Experiment, or TFX, is a game that lets you fly the Nighthawk F-117A Stealth Fighter, the Eurofighter 2000, and the Lockheed F-22 Superstar, in various missions, or arcade battles. You can customize ammunition on the fighters, and have a lot of control over them.

There are a couple of ways to play TFX. You can play arcade mode, which instantly puts you into the action, and you must progress through levels that get more difficult over time. Tour of Duty and Flashpoints mode lets you play a story-lined game concerning events in certain countries. A cool feature of TFX is a built in editor, called UN Commander, that lets you create your own missions to fly. Before you can start Tour of Duty mode, you must finish 10 training missions, which educates you on how to play the game.

When flying the plane, you can change between your selected weapons before flying, and the targeting system corresponding to them. A neat feature is you can cycle the different status windows on your three monitors in your cockpit, using the 1,2,3 keys. You have all the options a fighter jet would have like controlling landing gear, flaps, chaff, targeting systems, etc.

The game uses three-dimensional graphics, but it is a very early form of it, so doesn’t expect anything jaw dropping. The planes appear very blocky, and the textures don’t have much detail to them. You can view the plane at different angles, and the game even has a 3d cockpit mode (funny how MS Flight Sim hadn’t included this till FS2k), which lets you see the cockpit from a 3d perspective.

One of the best parts of TFX is the music and sound. The music is very enjoyable and gets you into the game; it actually reminds me of the music from Topgun, which fits perfectly with this game seeing both have the same theme. One of the cool things in this game concerning sound is the developer’s use of real voices, instead of just some text on the screen. The sound is a bit low quality, but does a good job of creating the ambience for this game.

You can use either a joystick or a keyboard to fly your plane, though I recommend trying to find an old game port joystick for this game. I have to say this was one of the best games I have ever reviewed, and you should give it a try, especially if you are a flight sim fan.

The txt file TFXKEYS.TXT list the default controls for this game using a keyboard, and TFXMK1.TXT using a joystick.

The game doesn’t seem to run in WinXP, nor VDMSound, so DOS-BOX or Pure DOS is your best bet.