Finally… finally, it looks like we may have the next great combat flight sim incoming

Steam Next Fest is rapidly getting known for bringing some very cool demos to the attention of the masses, but equally, there is so much you can easily miss if you are not all over the event.

For example, among all the ones you are likely to have heard of, I completely missed, despite loving the genre, Combat Pilot: Carrier Qualification – a new WWII combat fighter game that, at this stage at least, is set around the Midway islands during the War.

The team behind the project, which has no release date as yet, features veterans of many of the great combat sims and mods of recent years, but to get an actual combat sim based on new tech, rather than a rebuild of an old game with just an engine update, is exciting stuff.

I was playing combat flight sims in the 90s, so, over the years, I have had to put up with a fair amount of jank to get things up and running, so the potential of a gorgeous-looking sim running in Unreal Engine has certainly got me adding to my wishlist.

The Steam page reads thus:

Carrier Qualification is our inaugural title which we hope will be the first of many more to come. We plan to bring intense aerial combat to your computer in future titles, but first you need to learn how to take-off and land on an aircraft carrier!

Combat Pilot is the first hardcore flight-simulator to harness the power and flexibility of Unreal Engine 5. We have combined our own proprietary flight and physics engine (EntropyFM) with UE5 to make it not only the world’s leading game engine, but also a truly modern flight-sim engine.

Carrier Qualification lays the foundation for future Combat Pilot titles and focuses on the fundamentals of flight and operating a WWII warbird. Future Combat Pilot titles will build upon Carrier Qualification and come together to create a comprehensive combat flight-sim experience.

The Next Fest demo offered up two fighters and carriers in the beautiful Midway setting, and as you can see from the video below, things are quite far along. Only one of the two aircraft at the moment has a fully clickable cockpit, but by the time we get to launch, we can expect that to be completed.

Combat Pilot: Carrier Qualification key features

• Easy to create Quick Missions
• Flyable US Navy / Marine Corps F4F-4 fighter and Imperial Japanese Navy A6M2 Model 21 “Zero” fighter
• USS Enterprise and IJN Akagi aircraft carriers
• Realistic flight physics and systems modeling
• Realistic carrier take-offs and landings
• Midway Atoll (Sand and Eastern Islands)