Just in-case you missed it yesterday, Combat Pilot is available for an early sneak peek during Steam Next Fest with a trial available from now until March 2nd. The sim is still coming together but this is a chance to see where things are at now.

Here’s what you need to know

The free trial includes quick missions that let you fly around in an F4F-4 Wildcat and a A6M2 Model 21 Zero. Both the USS Enterprise and the IJN Akagi aircraft carriers are available and the sim is already sporting its own custom flight physics and systems modeling. Realistic carrier takeoff and landings are there and the carriers really do move now though they don’t, as some readers have noted, have wake trails just yet.

If you need a little help setting it up, Combat Pilot did release a video yesterday walking you through the UI and getting yourself up and running with the new sim.

To repeat: this is still early!

This is just an early look at what Combat Pilot is in the process of developing. It’s far earlier a look than we’d traditionally get and I think that may be putting a few people off a bit.

Combat Pilot has lots of things already happening. It has carriers, it has aircraft with working instruments, folding wings, and flaps, and ailerons. All of that stuff I think we take for granted but it all needs to be programmed, animated, and made to happen. It doesn’t have combat yet, it doesn’t have a full mission structure or anything like that. The sim needs to crawl before it can walk before it can run.

Remember that most sims take many years to come together. Microsoft Flight Simulator, released in 2020, spent over five years in development and benefited from at least some technologies that came before it as well as having a large budget and hundreds of developers. Other sims like IL-2 Great Battles relied on technology developed almost a decade before. DCS World still has structures that you can trace back to Lock-On: Modern Air Combat and the Flanker series that came before them… all the way back in 1995. X-Plane has more or less been in continual development through 12 successive major releases and periodic minor releases that span back over 3-decades.

Every flight sim on the market currently has a lineage that traces its way back decades… this one is new. That gives it opportunities to shed old ways of doing things and build something for the future. It’s going to take time. That’s not discouragement either because what I already see is encouraging and there’s a process to everything that hopefully will have chance to play out.

So go, check it out, try it for yourself, marvel at how far its come but equally at how far it still needs to go!