Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 3 [PC]

There are few air combat games, and if you don't like Ace Combat's arcade style of fighting this one is what you will like.

The game is set in World War II, and you can fly and fight with a lot of aircrafts form United Kingdom, USA or Germany. The gameplay, as the name suggests, it's very simulative (has the same engine of Flight Simulator), but you can customize options to suit your needs, so you can both fly around just shooting down enemy fighters or deal with all dangers and difficulties of a war pilot.
Since it is a Flight Simulator, you will have a lot of commands to deal with, but hopefully you can forget about a lot of them. But a good joystick or gamepad with analogic sticks is required, it's very hard to make your flight go as you want with the keyboard (that will be still required for a lot of command)
You don't have only to pilot fighters: you can also jump on a bomber, with the option to cicle through pilot and turret positions.

There is a nice selection of aircrafts: Spitfire, Mosquito, P-51, B-25, B-26, FW 190, BF 109 and a lot of others. There are also some aircrafts that were going to be put into the fight if the war lasted longer (as the De Havilland DH-100, the P-80 Shooting Star and the Dornier Do-335) and even some prototypes (P-55 Ascender, Go-229).
They are nice modeled and with a pretty realistic damage sistem: if you're hit you will see bullet holes on the aircraft, and depending on where you got hit the aircraft's performance will be altered. Be sure to learn the keys for opening the canopy and bail out - you'll surely need them soon!
IA in the game is well coded, but it has some holes: while enemy fighter and AA fire will try to add air intakes on your plane your squadron won't do very much to help you. Yesterday I got destroyed by a FW-190 while I was trying to shoot down another one... but there were only 3 FW-190 and I was leading a squadron of 8 aircrafts.

The campaign has a lot of mission types and let you choose to be an American, British or German pilot. Your pilot skills (G forces tollerance, sight and max health) will be upgraded with experience points gained from fullfilling missions, but the whole campaing tends to become repetitive and it's hard to do more than 4-5 missions in a row before starting to be bored.

Final score: 7/10. It's a very good game, but it has a lot of holes to be filled.