Jane's Attack Squadron

As a combat flight simulator, Jane's Attack Squadron allows players to pilot military aircraft in a three-dimensional (3D) graphical environment. The game is set in Western Europe during World War II; and players may control fifteen German and Allied planes from the era, including the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, Supermarine Spitfire, Junkers Ju 88, Avro Lancaster and Consolidated B-24 Liberator. Although dogfights are possible, the game places a heavy focus on air-to-ground combat. Objectives range from bombing and torpedo runs to defense and escort missions.

The player may engage in tutorials, "quick missions", "single missions" and a campaign. Quick missions allow the player to select variables such as the objective and the number of friendly and enemy aircraft, while single missions, of which there are five, are scripted, "pre-made" levels. Two campaigns are available: one each for the Allies and Germans. Both campaigns feature ten missions that branch depending on the outcome achieved by the player.

In September 1994, Looking Glass Technologies employee Seamus Blackley told Computer Gaming World that he wanted to create a combat-based sequel to Flight Unlimited, whose development he was directing at the time. The magazine's Johnny L. Wilson wrote: "If Flight Unlimited can pass the civilian tests, the military version should be right behind it". In March of the next year, Blackley told PC Gamer US that the sequel "should feel so real that pilots will be afraid.

They'll feel the gun hits". 0, in favor of the real-time computational fluid dynamics (CFDs) model he created for Flight Unlimited. When PC Gamer's Bernie Yee asked why the team had waited to make a combat flight simulator, Blackley responded that they wanted to "retrain" players first. In September, Computer Gaming World reported that Blackley was designing a combat-based sequel to Flight Unlimited under the working title Flight Combat.

Denny Atkin of Computer Gaming World wrote that Jane's Attack Squadron "had the potential to be sim of the year in 2000", but that it had been rendered largely irrelevant by delays and "unrealized design goals". He believed that its graphics would have been "state of the art in 2000", but he found them middling in 2002 and he noted the presence of numerous glitches. He considered the game's most serious flaw to be its low number of missions. Although Atkin found the air-to-air combat "generally fun", citing "good pilot AI" and "decent" flight physics, he believed that the game's bombing runs were its most outstanding element.

He hoped that fans would use the mission and physics editors to improve the game, and he concluded: "It's buggy, but when it works it's worth flying". Andy Mahood of PC Gamer US wrote that Jane's Attack Squadron is "unquestionably an entertaining and unique WWII prop sim", but he believed that it was clearly inferior to games such as IL-2 Sturmovik. He found the game's graphics to be outdated and its design to be "simplistic", and he wrote that its "somewhat basic flight model" prevents advanced maneuvers. He praised the game's sound effects and music, as well as its "intricate damage modeling", as its best features.