The game features an A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft that takes part in a variety of missions in West Germany during a hypothetical limited conventional attack by the Warsaw Pact.

Known as the Virtual Battlefield Environment (VBE), the system still required programming tools to build out the objects, but once they were finished, they could be loaded into the game engine from individual files.

All of this was combined with an improved version of the graphics engine developed for Hellcats, allowing players to use multiple monitors and any resolution their machine could support.

Hellcats used a polygon-based flat-shaded system that utilized differential updating to avoid bottlenecks in the computer bus and thereby improve frame rates.

A-10 retained the basics from Hellcats, but added the ability for small areas of texture mapping to be applied, which was used on the vehicles to add roundels and squadron markings.

This was followed some time later by a fairly functional demo version, which took place on a mythical island with a number of friendly and enemy objects in the area.

For the release version, a series of missions in northern Germany were created, along with a new mission-planning map system that was widely lauded.

The VBE specifications were never released to 3rd parties, and the few public comments on the topic from Parsoft claimed it was simply not ready and required work to clean it up and document it.

The game included a unique "active hand" system that allowed the player to manipulate the switches and controls without having to remember keyboard commands.

Additionally, the user could display and control the waypoints for the aircraft in the mission through a dialog-box based editor, customizing their flight plans.

Games would typically have the player switch back and forth between flight and the mission map, looking at their progress and perhaps newly spotted targets that were not immediately obvious from the cockpit.

The selection of missions included with the game generally increased in difficulty with a growing number of targets and friendly vehicles.

He notes its "extremely fluid" graphics and excellent frame rate,[2] but spends almost half of the article explaining VBE and its future potential.

He noted its "stunningly realistic" missions and its "gorgeously rendered" landscapes, concluding with a somewhat muted "A-10 Attack is a welcome addition to anyone's virtual battlefield".