Linux Air Combat Reviews

This is a good game! It has many, MANY things I do not care for, but it's definitely worth messing with! I will go over the problems, novel benefits, and my overall view in that order. I tried formatting this, but SourceForge ate the paragraphs. Also, for context, I'm on Linux Mint 22.3, but everything good and bad has been present on my little Arch Linux Xfce4 machine as well. I cannot set up a resolution above 1080p. For some people, this isn't an issue. It is for me, unfortunately. And every time I change it to the resolution that would perfectly fit my screen with the toolbar still visible (2560x1400p,) it is once again the standard 1080p when I start the game. If I launch the game in fullscreen, it will hijack the entire resolution of my desktop and change it to 1080 until a restart, and can't be closed with Alt+F4 (which makes me cagey about running it in fullscreen to begin with.) The main menu screen has this... painful red flashing, that causes me a migraine every time I see it. I am writing this review while fighting the visual aura I got from it. I don't think I can turn it off, which would be a godsend. I am photophobic and have to wear silly red glasses outside, so flight sims are hard to begin with, the flashing red just kills me. I get the appeal (I think,) I just can't deal with it. Some keybinds don't seem to rebind properly in the game, the selected control method is always one prior to the one listed if you close the pause menu with "escape," and the gauges all flicker about wildly, as though they were physically being shaken about violently with you in the aircraft, with the digital readings changing once every second at fastest. Now, the many benefits. It has aircraft I would consider the slightest bit niche among what is available in flight sims (Re 2000, B5N) and can only be found otherwise in the absolute nightmare that is War Thunder, or the BAT mod for IL-2 1946, which is nightmarish to install and run on any OS nowadays. The flight models are good, even if I've never had a virtual horizon that looked anything like this before and it makes it a little disorienting. Planes turn and accelerate with the kind of heft a warbird should, they shoot straight and into the reticle in an arc, lead seems about right (it's engaging and provides a challenge without being unfun,) and even if every cockpit is the same, there is a very real difference between each and every plane. A Mustang is a Mustang; turns really well at high speed, but high Gs make you black out. It's what it should be. There's something to be said for a sim that just does what it should, when push comes to shove, and provides you with an overall decent experience once you're stuck in. For me, I have to basically figure out what I want to do, sprint through the main menu to prevent the spell of instant eye strain that is the red flashing, but on the other side is a tidy little sim that doesn't shy away from its age, and thus, presents a relatively toy-clean aesthetic that is easy to digest in the fast-moving and incredibly dynamic world of a dogfight. It gives it a very unique feel with an actual cohesive art style, as opposed to trying to look totally real. Even if extremely dated compared to things like IL-2, it's relatively timeless. If they leaned into it more and gave everything slightly less realistic airfoils, and made it all kind of have a chunky/Daytona USA style that was a bit less realistic (shaded sharp, distinct angles) and gave each and every aircraft dimension, it would easily be my favorite flight sim available to look at while flying, as far as aesthetics. A Daytona USA styled air combat sim. It is superb to me, in regards to being a pipe dream I have had since high school made real. Overall, you have nothing to lose. It's flawed. It's old. It takes some messing around with the conf file. It's a product of its time, being based on a sim from 2003, but it's been modernized enough and is good enough to be worth checking out. Go dust off your old Logitech Extreme 3D, or that Xbox controller you keep in a drawer somewhere near your desk, and give this thing a shot. You'll at least have an experience to remember.

Finally a total Linux Combat flight simulator that works on EVERY Linux release ! And everybody on Linux can play, because the Hardware requirements are very low, one can play it with one's own Desk- or Laptop . I must say that at first (3 years ago) I wasn't so attracted to Linux Air Combat because of the graphics AND the difficulty to shoot an enemy plane down, but know that I stuck to it for 3 years, I finally getting the hang of it, AND all the WWII planes available really fly the way they used too during that war . Another advantage is that I connected over voice communication with the main developer Mr. Robert Bosen , who's very polite and explains with a very calm and clear voice what extra settings you must make to e.g. the voice communication which uses Mumble, AND some settings in the LAC-Menu to obtain a best frame rate .

Very good game, a bit hard to pilot at the beginning, but that means I need training!

First thing I have to say is that Linux Air Combat is awesome. Second, it is NOT a video game and if that's what you are looking for, you will likely be overwhelmed. LAC is unquestionably the best linux native air combat simulator out there. If your interests lie in WWII aircraft and WWII air combat experiences, you will love LAC. The developer has spent countless hours researching the historical and technical records of 54 of the most significant combat aircraft of WWII. and if you want to feel what flying a P38 Lightning after a flight of Japanese Kates felt like, this is as close as you'll get without a time machine. Non-flight graphics and ground detail have been kept to a minimum so LAC will easily fly on almost anything that runs Linux. Now available in source and appimage formats. Support from the developer is first rate and the community of flyers growing around LAC are friendly and helpful to new pilots.

After a lot of struggling and with some excellent help from the developor, I would like to say that this game is extremely detailed and unbelievable! But, equally awesome was the help and support from the developer.

I could not get my comprehensive review to format correctly for easy viewing here, so I uploaded it into the "Files" section. Download it there. Look for the file named "Lac977Review.pdf". Here is the concluding paragraph of that review: "At the time of this writing, LAC has emerged as the overall leader in free, open-source combat flight sims for Linux. It’s not perfect, and it’s not the best in any one area, but it’s better than average at everything that counts. It’s fun, well documented, and easy to learn. In particular, because its emphasis is on historic simulation more than on gaming, LAC is far more realistic than the game console toys that are popular with teens and young adults, but it is almost as easy to learn because there is no need to memorize magic spells or game-specific, whimsical, imaginary features: it's all just science and history. LAC is full of compromises made in the name of fun, simplicity, high performance, and easy learning. Those compromises diminish the painful aspects of ultra-realism, but the resulting balance yields an almost perfect blend of realism and fun. It just works, and for anybody that understands the basics of flight and historic air combat tactics, it just makes sense." On 20Sep2025 I added another review in ".pdf" format to the same downloaded area describe above. This one is shorter and updated to represent version 9.83 from Aug2025. It's titled "LacReviewByPerplexityAI250920aa.pdf".