Take to the skies of World War 1 with Rise of Flight

While modern aircraft are well served for flight simulators, the early fighters and bombers from the First World War have often been ignored. Rise of Flight is an impressive flight simulator of that period and the basic version can be played at no cost.

The Rise of Flight Demo includes two aircraft, the Spad 13 and Albatros DV.a. The aircraft are the only real limitation as the demo version includes full access to single and multiplayer games, career mode and the gunner position in bombers and recon aircraft when playing multiplayer games.

Registration is required to play the game but this only needs an active email address for a basic account. Click here to go to the registration page. Full instructions for activating the demo version of the game can be found here.

While the basic game is free, more aircraft can be bought from the Rise of Flight website. Prices for extra planes vary from $7.62 for the Sopwith Camel and Fokker DR1 Triplane, and $13.99 for the Bristol F2B. There are discounts for multiple purchases.

The opening interface is easy to use and the quick mission builder can set up many different scenarios either with an advantage for the player or not.

The graphics are very good if your computer is good enough.

To give some idea of the level of detail in this simulator, the gunner positions of the larger aircraft even simulate the speed with which the guns could be moved. This might get frustrating but it is a clever idea.

We also found that the default joystick controls include a control to recock the guns on the aircraft.

As a game the system requirements are quite high. It works with all versions of Windows. An Intel Core 2 Quad 2.6GHz or Intel Core i5 or i7 2.6GHz or faster. 4GB of RAM is recommended along with a graphics card with at least 1GB of RAM either a Geforce GTX260 or Radeon HD5850 or later. At least 10GB of hard disk space is required.