This simulator put players in the cockpit of a US Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II, commonly known as the "Warthog." Unusually for its time, the cockpit was a digitized photograph of a real A-10's cockpit, giving players a degree of realism that was not common at the time. Menu graphics were similarly digitized.
Game graphics were 3-D polygon, however. Depending on system setup, sound was either PC speaker or produced through your sound card, if you had one.
Players could fly missions as single, one-off flights or fly those same missions in a sequence in the game's campaign. As the game was released during the Cold War, the stock campaign took place in a fictional conflict in Eastern Europe after the Warsaw Pact attacks NATO. The campaign was not fully dynamic, but any characters and units prevented from destruction would be available to assist the player in later missions. On the other hand, if a friendly column of tanks was allowed to be overrun by Soviet T-80's would not be handy in later missions to save the player from pesky SAM batteries.
Most missions involve protecting NATO ground forces from enemy tanks, which is exactly what the A-10 was designed to do. However, Soviet Mi-24 Hind helicopters and MiG-27 Floggers make an appearance as well as air-to-air threats.
There were two expansion campaigns to follow. The first continued the Warsaw Pact/NATO conflict. The second, released after Desert Storm in 1991, took place over Kuwait and southern Iraq.
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