Gunship Review - By William "BBall" Ball Page 2 of 2
During each mission, if you find your machine in pieces, you can switch to your wingman's mount, press Shift/F1, and viola…now you're flying his helo. And (if allowed in the CONFIGURATION section) you can press Shift/R to "respawn" into a fresh helicopter. After each mission, you'll find a Debriefing screen showing you the results. You can see the whole enchilada with the "Objectives" button, or see how Sierra Hotel you are with the "Statistics" selection. If you didn't do so well, you'll see a "Fly again" button. One thing that truly pissed me off in the campaign, is that you have to "win" every mission to proceed to the next. You might find yourself hitting the "Fly again" button many times. My opinion is that in real life, one doesn't always succeed in every mission, so you should be able to proceed to the next one no matter what the result of the proceeding one might be.
So enough of the basics about the title…how does it fly? Well, herein lies the rub. The flight model is one of the BIGGEST complaints about this game (I'll call it a sim, if they tweak the FM with a patch). When flying from the outside view, or within the Pilot's cockpit, it flies like it's suspended on rubber bands. Very twitchy on the collective; a bit up collective, and that's too much, and bit of down and you can find yourself falling like a rock….takes a VERY small adjustment at times. I haven't seen where vortex ring problems, translational lift (although mentioned in the manual), or retreating blade stalls are modeled. And pedal turns can be something to behold. If your using your keyboard, just forget it, and I'm not sure sim rudder pedals are much better. Sometimes the pedal turn is a thing of beauty, sometimes you feel like your at Gilly's getting thrown off the mechanical bull. I have noticed that transitioning to a hover quickly, and applying pedal, will have you flying backwards in a heartbeat, so forward cyclic is a must. Not unlike real life here I guess.
But the beauty of this game, is you DON'T HAVE TO FLY it! Remember my opening statement calling this a Copilot/Gunner's dream? Well, it's true. One can simply sit in the C/PG seat, give the pilot commands, and turn steel into molten lava. It takes a little getting used to, but I'm going to be the first to admit it right here, right now…I LIKE being a C/PG. I guess it's because my parents dropped me on my head as an infant, but sending one of those HOT 3 wired-guided "gifts" to a speeding BDRM, seeing my wingman take him out, breaking lock, steering that bad boy around looking for another victim, lock on….then boom! Way cool. I know…..stay on the Prosac.
And BTW, they do model weather in this. It will always be one of my pet peeves to fly a sim where it's a beautiful VFR day (or night) all the time. War ain't like that; people fly and die on crappy weather days too. The clouds look good, the overcasts and rain are believable…overall, not bad at all on the weather.
So what are the gripes about this one? The FM to be sure. The fact that you can't select "reverse collective" to more realistically model your HOTASS. The waypoint system, when in the game, is crazy at best, and maddening at worst You have two ways to change a waypoint; 1) go to the map, click on it and drag it to a new position, or 2) make FOUR (yes, four) keystrokes to "go to the next waypoint". So if you're heading for number 1 and want to go to number 4, you got it! Nine pushes of the buttons to go there! BTW, no matter which waypoint you end up heading for, it'll always read number one. Apparently, the person that came up with this, has never flown a sim before (shoots your Navigation SA all to hell). And the problem with the map/drag thing is that, sometimes when you click on that waypoint, it just adds another one….maddening.
Some of the C/PG commands to the pilot are also a bit porked. Like telling him to "turn right", and he turns left ("your OTHER right you idiot!"). You can get around that by just joysticking (is that a new verb?) your view to whatever direction you want to go, pressing "G", and off he goes.
And you thought that Lee Harvey Oswald with his K-Mart rifle, and the "magic bullet" was just a fluke? Oh no Virginia; this one has it too. If you don't select "resistant" at the Player Vulnerability box on the CONFIGURATION page, then any ol' T-90 with Boris shooting at you traveling 30kph, is going to "rock your world". Seems like one hit from a kid with a slingshot will take you down. After doing the "resistant" thing, it's much, much better.
There has also been a lot of grumbling about the view system. While in the C/PG's cockpit (BTW, I do think the cockpits look nice), you simply move the joystick to pan your view. In the pilot's seat, it's bit different whereby you can either pan in VERY SMALL increments, or press a button on the stick and then pan like in the front seat using the joystick (the helo continues to fly using the last control inputs made before pushing the button). I personally didn't find the view thing a bugaboo at all. In fact, it's quite fun to hit F9, and watch your AI dudes (Pilot and C/PG in Tads mode) fly around and do their shooting thing.
The avionics you say? No, not like Longbow 2. If you have the FCR radar installed, your "radar screen" on one of the MFD's is an "always on" kind of thing. You can lock onto a target (dead or alive), and launch. But within the C/PG's seat, you get to access the ORT (Optical Relay Tube…much like a periscope in a submarine) and get a "front row seat" view of the carnage. By hitting the F3 key, you can pan around with the joystick, find stuff, lock on, and send it to the happy hunting ground. Or if your busy getting that pesky beer cap off, you can just select C/PG in tads mode while flying the helo, then select F3 and not touch anything. You'll be treated to your "alter ego" doing what his country paid tons of money to train him to do, turn expensive things into junk And BTW, the Tiger only uses a mast mounted sight for targeting. For those of us that think this thing is about "magic" radars and missiles, I say take the Eurocopter (with no radar, and the wire-guided HOT 3s) into battle and see how well you can do….it's all about getting "real small" when you have to.
The scuttlebutt around the forums is that they AREN'T planning a patch. I personally find that hard to believe. I have about a zillion sims sitting on my desk (OK, not a zillion, but close), and I can't name but one or two that haven't been patched. So I'm guessing that with enough bitching about the FM, etc., someone at Hasbro/Micorprose(/Ford/Chevy/Dr.Pepper…who can keep up with whose making these things anymore?)will put out a patch.
So what's the final verdict? Do you like this or not, Bball? Good question. Some folks want to call this effort "arcadish", well I don't totally agree with that. My view of an arcade game is something TOTALLY unbelievable…you know, flying your helo into a stadium to take out the terrorist at the Super Bowl..this doesn't fit that definition to me. I guess rather than call it an arcade game, I'd have to call it an "Armor Killing from a Helo Game"….too long a title to put on the box to be sure.
The graphics are stunning I will say. Slowly advancing at dawn, peering out over the (well done) countryside through the (even more beautifully done) morning mist, is truly a thing to behold. Flying the helos is semi-OK if you accept the fact that the FM a bit boned up. And again, I refuse to even call this a flight sim, because of that. The avionics aren't totally realistic and hard to learn, but that didn't bother me too much (I do love that ORT).
But I guess the reason it will stay on my HD, is that I get to be the kid that no one ever picked for basketball….you know the one…with the thick glasses with tape in the middle….who can't fly, so he grows up to become THE COPILOT/GUNNER FROM HELL…..ya, that's me. Is it for the combat helo enthusiast? Well, if you buy these things just for the helo flying experience, then no, it's not for you. But if you can look past that, then you might want to give it a try (and join me in the C/PG hall of fame).
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