So it’s been a few years since the mig 29 has been talked about it feels, and it feels worse than ever in 2025. When it was first released, it was a dominating jet because it did it all. It was fast, it could turn amazing, and it had some of the best missiles in the game. Due to all of this, gaijin nerfed it several times into the ground, performing several times worse than public documentations provide they should while also buffing it’s competition the f16 to where now the NATO aircraft is without a doubt the more dominant platform in regards to turn rate, high aoa pulls, and even weaponry, especially at top tier.
Let’s be blunt. The mig 29 feels like trying to drive a school bus, and the mig 29 smt feels like trying to drive a school bus with cement bricks for wheels. Can you get kills and potentially perform well? Sure. Will you ever do it by using your plane’s strengths to their fullest? Never in a million years. There are several accounts of german mig 29 pilots talking about their training with nato f16 pilots and how they would absolutely dominate them in a merge. During operation desert storm, f16’s and other nato jets were told not to merge with mig 29 jets because the redfor fighter would crush them in a bfm engagement. Take that in for a moment. The US told their pilots not to dogfight because they were not confident that their jets that were built to be the ultimate dogfighter could beat the mig 29 in bfm.
So, why have we gotten to where we are today? Well I think it’s likely that gaijin for whatever reason felt pressured to nerf the mig 29 to make the f16 stand out back in the day. However, since then we’ve gotten several jets that are much more maneuverable like the eurofighter, the rafale, the su 30sm, and the legacy hornet. Why is it that the mig 29 is unable to have a decent flight performance again? I’m not asking for it to be turned into a ufo, but as it stands the jet is nearly unplayable and one of the biggest disappointments of the russian tech tree.
As a final point to this rant, why can’t the first mig 29 have r73’s? Sure back in the day it needed to be nerfed, but having r60m’s at 12.7 on a fighter makes it dead in the water 9 times out of 10. The su 27, thatt is only .3 br higher can have several r73 missiles, several r27er’s, and r27et’s. Why can’t the first mig 29 at least get 4 r73’s? It would not be broken, and we’re at a point where the jet deserves a chance to at least stand a fighting chance in the meta. Gaijin, please make the mig 29 fun to fly again. It’s been in the trash pile too long.
