Available Platform: DOS

Raptor: Call of The Shadows is a vertical-scroller shoot 'em up developed by Cygnus Studios, published by Apogee Software in 1994.

One of the best examples of a game that sank without a trace in the market due to misleading marketing, F-22 Raptor is another of Novalogic's 'sim-lite' entries, similar to the famous Comanche series. Instead of marketing it as an arcade shooter with some sim elements, Novalogic decided to call it one of the most 'realistic flight simulators'.

Game Review

Raptor: Call of The Shadows is a vertical-scroller shoot 'em up developed by Cygnus Studios, published by Apogee Software in 1994.

It was originally published for DOS, but has since been ported to Windows, iOS, Linux, and Mac OS. The game won Power Play's Best Shareware game of 1994. The Shareware version was released for free, at Mountain King Studios (formerly Cygnus Studios) homepage.

The game is a top-down scrolling shooter. You play a mercenary, flying the advanced ship Raptor. You are sent on missions to destroy the enemies of MegaCorps. The game is broken up into three sectors, “Bravo Sector”, “Tango Sector”, and “Outer Regions”. Each of these sectors has nine submissions or “waves”, giving us a total of 27 missions. Between each level you can save your game and upgrade your ship.

Raptor is one of the best PC shoot em' ups ever. Every part of the game gels so well, from the excellent music and sound effects to the incredible map design. The graphics are beautiful too. This is a classic that holds up.

Review by: Tasha
Published: 30 January 2017 8:08 pm

Ever Since F-29 Retaliator Came Out on the Amiga, big posh futuristic planes have been popular subject matter for flight sims. Current planes appeal to buffs who are obsessed with realism - mostly because they roar at twice the speed of sound and can take out seven MiGs at a time. They're also great fun. Then there's the fact that squillions of dollars are spent on military hardware, giving designers the opportunity to deliver plenty of realistic hi-tech action. Hoorah!

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The Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor is Uncle Sam's latest baby, combining speed, stealth and state-of-the-art avionics in one big plane. Designed to replace the F-15, the F-22 can cruise at supersonic speeds, it's virtually undetectable to most radars and is manoeuvrable as buggery, thanks to its vectored-thrust engines. This impressive list of features explains why the F-22 is the subject of many sims at the moment, the latest being NovaLogic's F-22 Raptor.

NovaLogic have quite a history of making hi-tech sims.In recent years they've based them around helicopters (the Comanche series), around tanks (Armored Fist) and F-22s (Lightning II). F-22 Raptor has been developed with close co-operation from Lockheed Martin, and it boasts reworked graphics, a new campaign structure and (it's claimed) improved flight modelling and realism.

A bit of meat on the bone

F-22 Raptor has three main gameplay modes - quick missions, campaigns and multi-player. The quick missions let you get straight into the air with the minimum of faffing around, and the first few take the form of training missions, teaching you about the various cockpit displays and weapons systems on board the F-22. These have been very sensibly designed, and the briefing for each mission tells you which keys will come in handy, which cuts down on all that tiresome trawling through the manual malarkey. Once you're in the cockpit, a nice man gives you all manner of handy hints and basically tells you what you're supposed to be doing.

The missions themselves start with simply flying around, and proceed onto using the different missiles and bombs, finally finishing with more realistic combat situations.Once you've mastered these, you can try your hand at the campaign mode, the real meat of the game. The first such mission is set in Angola, where you're involved in a peacekeeping role, sorting out the baddies and generally being a nice bloke. The various cut-scenes that occur during the campaigns are very nicely done, and provide lots of atmosphere. Once you've completed each one, you move onto the next. The rest of the scenarios are set in Jordan, Russia, Columbia and Iran.

Of course, the single most important aspect of any flight sim is the in-game graphics, and those in F-22 Raptor aren't bad - but they're not great either. The scenery's pretty good, with nicely texture-mapped mountains and forests, and distant mountains that fade in convincingly, rather than appearing out of nowhere as is the case in some sims. There's commendable detail on the planes, which have realistic-looking paint jobs and markings. There's also a good set of views, with the obligatory external views of your plane, enemy aircraft and missiles, and a decent virtual cockpit that can be smoothly panned around.

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A slug skiing on salt

The usual penalty for good graphics is a crap frame rate, and while F-22 Raptor was perfectly playable on a medium detail setting on a P200MMX (the spec recommended for optimum performance), it wasn't exactly smoothsville either. This isn't helped by the lack of support for 3D accelerator cards. While most people still don't have a 3Dfx card, you only have to see games like Longbow 2, EF2000 and Flying Corps running with one to realise that they can make a huge difference to the frame rate and the general image quality. F-22 Raptor suffers in this latter aspect as well, as the lack of hardware filtering makes everything look a bit rough around the edges. Having said all this, if you don't have a 3D card and you've got a fast PC, F-22 Raptor's graphics are sufficiently decent.

The flight model in F-22 Raptor seems reasonable, which, given the amount of technology on board, means that the real thing is probably quite easy to fly. Unfortunately, the gameplay feels a bit simplistic, and while there are plenty of different instruments, you're mostly limited to just looking at them - there's none of the serious fiddling about that's necessary to complete missions successfully in EF2000. While the real F-22 has obviously been designed to be as easy to use as possible, it seems unlikely that it's only got one radar mode, and only one way of using the autopilot, for example. While these would be fine in 90 per cent of cases, I'd have thought that real combat situations would need a bit more flexibility than this. The weapons on offer are also limited to two air-to-air missiles, guns and one type of bomb. Again, surely the F-22 isn't like this in real life?

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F-22 Raptor also loses out in the realism stakes where the campaigns are concerned. There are plenty of missions, and your performance affects subsequent operations, but there's no real mission planning, and although you can move waypoints, you can't add more, or send different flights to bomb other targets, for example. Still, the campaigns are good enough to provide a sense of continuity and keep you coming back for more.

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While the overall simplicity of F-22 Raptor makes it easy to get into the air and start blowing things up, it also makes it less of a sim and a bit more of a game. While this might appeal to some, it also means that its long-term appeal is rather limited, and once you've completed the campaigns it's unlikely that you'll come back to it again. Still, if the existing graphics are given a much-needed boost with a 3D card patch, F-22 Raptor could certainly be one of the better looking flight sims around.

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