I am a big fan of the Hurricane - it's not for nothing that "K5083" is my handle on most forums - and was a big fan of AH's Hurricane for P3D, so this was an easy call for me. I didn't want or necessarily expect much. A straightforward port of the P3D Hurri to MSFS would have been fine. Having tried it out, I'm generally satisfied, but feel that this product was rushed out the door a bit. It gives both more and less than the direct port-over that would have satisfied me.
To start with the positives, the 3D mesh seems generally OK, sounds are decent, and I like that we get the different variants. The delivery version with the ATA pilot is a nice touch, and the GPS version and modern pilot are welcome for doing latter-day warbird activities. The flight model seems reasonable although perhaps a little too easy to do aerobatics in the vertical plane. It is a sweetheart to land, like the P3D version.
For the drawbacks, systems and controls are a bit of a mixed bag. I can't figure out how to work the primer; when I click on it, it unlocks and then locks again, no matter whether I just click the mouse or hold it down. I have not been able to actually pump the handle. However, it turns out that this unnecessary anyway, the engine so far always starts for me with no priming. I would prefer a primer handle I can actually operate and an engine that requires it. The brake system is the same as on the AH Spitfire, which is fine, I can use the same controls I had set up for that. It turns easily when taxiing even at low speeds using only rudder and no brakes, which doesn't seem right. In the air, the engine does not cut out under negative G as one would expect. You can fly inverted all day and the engine will never miss. There is no VR camera position, the default VR view puts you outside of the cockpit to the right of the fuselage, so that has to be added to the cameras.cfg.
The most disappointing thing about it is the exterior textures, which are poorly researched. Even from the trailer and advertising images, I could see that the fuselage roundel for all skins using the standard 35-inch roundel were incorrectly proportioned. Measuring the dimensions from the textures, the correct proportions of a type A1 roundel would be yellow 7, blue 5, white 3, red 1, whereas the AH roundels are 7, 5.2, 3.4, 1.6. In other words, assuming the outer yellow diameter to be correct, the blue, white, and red discs are each progressively more oversized with the red one ending up 1.6x the diameter it should be. The oversized roundel on GZ-L and the under-wing type A roundels are more nearly correct. I had to spend an hour in Photoshop correcting the fuselage roundels before I could stand to load the plane. While there, I noticed that many of the roundels are off-center, most are incorrectly placed on the fuselage (some higher on one side than on the other), the fin flashes are often the wrong size and proportion, and the fonts used for the fuselage serial are varied but mostly incorrect. Then there is the Hurricat KE-M, which is even worse. The type C1 roundels are completely wrong, the roundels under the wings are the wrong style altogether (A), and every marking on the skin is wrongly sized and located relative to the photo that exists of this plane. I decided to just forget I ever saw that one instead of correcting it. This is all a shame because AH has proven many times in the past that it can get British markings right. These skins are just low-effort. Hopefully the repainters will start from scratch and not rely on the stock skins too much as a base. I will be doing 3 or 4 skins for my own use and use that approach.
The manual shows signs of neglect as well. It is clearly edited from the Spitfire manual, and they forgot to change "Spitfire" to "Hurricane" in some places, and even used a Spitfire rather than a Hurricane as the background image on one page.
Overall I'm happy with it at the price point. It is not as good as the Spitfire but better than the P-51, and with some better skins from the community, will adequately fill that Hurricane-shaped hole in the sim.
August
BAF H33 (00004) by JanKees Blom, on Flickr
BAF H33 (00005) by JanKees Blom, on Flickr
knil feb (00004) by JanKees Blom, on Flickr
knil march(00001) by JanKees Blom, on Flickr
LE-A (00008) by JanKees Blom, on Flickr
LE-A (00002) by JanKees Blom, on Flickr
