Lastly, the game recognizes the Sixxaxis in your Dual Shock 3 or Sixxaxis controller, and will allow you to control either your movement, which is just crazy, or allow you to look around your cockpit in free look and control where you target your gun. You can also dust off your flight stick and use it too.
Then, when you’re feeling confident enough, you can graduate to Realistic flight controls, which force you to deal with things like momentum as the helicopter flies less like an airplane. Firstly, you have the Trainee controls which are there for you to learn the basics of flying a helicopter. There are an abundance of control options in Apache Air Assault. Hearing the whoosh of leaves as you pass over a tree is a thrilling experience at 170 MPH and 60 feet in the air. Oh, and watch out if you happen to be flying low over a forested area. The thump thump thump of your rotor blades is much more distinct if you play the game in the third person camera view, but even when you are inside the cockpit you can hear all kinds of alarms and beeps trying to inform you that you should kiss your behind goodbye. Hearing about the enemy targeting you when there is nothing to be seen or even an enemy on the map makes you scratch your head. They talk amongst themselves when moving the story along, but otherwise they repeat themselves a lot, often out of context for what they are supposed to be talking about. As there are three separate helicopter crews, you will hear an American crew, a British crew and a mixed mercenary crew consisting of one American and one Brit. They aren’t even that bad, but they are played constantly, over and over.
If you’ve ever watched a Michael Bay, movie you’ll recognize these two themes immediately. There are maybe two themes that play throughout its entirety, the intro song and the victory after a hard battle song. The music is probably the weakest aspect of the game. Hell they even modeled in infantry, but good luck seeing them without magnification. I personally went with a White HUD and never once had an issue trying to see what my heading or airspeed was.Įven on the ground vehicles, the developers put enough detail in so that the tanks aren’t just rectangles and squares. You can modify the Heads Up Display to display in just about any colour you seek, and let me tell you that is no small benefit. The helicopters which are included in the game are extremely well detailed, right down to the warning signs and flight controls in the cockpit. In the non campaign missions which you get to play, you can set the weather yourself, and just try to fly without using the FLIR when flying at night during a snowstorm. The game also takes place at different times of day and in diverse weather conditions. Trees are all over the place and are something to be wary of, as you’ll be down amongst them. As there are three separate campaigns, all intermingled, you will see missions over deserts, mountains and deep in the jungle. It’s not as good looking as the previously released Gaijin Entertainment game IL-2 was, but it’s still excellent. The game looks very good, especially in motion. There isn’t a whole lot of story telling in the game, just enough for you to strap on your wings and get blasting. One campaign is set in Africa and deals with Pirates who are too well armed and organized, another deals with a drug cartel in South America that is too well armed and organized, and the final campaign is in one of those generic “-stans”Â, where revolutionaries are too well… well, you get the picture. Each of them is dealing with an insurgency of some kind, and all of them seem to tie together the further into the game you get. The game follows the experiences of three helicopter crews in three different warzones across the globe. Lets strap on our helmets and see where this thrill ride goes. Battlefield Bad Company 2 has a few maps online where you can take command of one and do some damage, but good luck getting to the thing before the thirty or so people who are waiting for it ahead of you. Anyway, it’s been a little while now since we’ve had a good helicopter sim game. Hell I even suffered through Nic Cage and Sean Young in Firebirds just so I could see them on screen. Some of those games were simulations and some of them were arcade games, but they all showed me that I really should have been an Apache pilot. I found this to be true in games like Gunship, Jane’s Apache Longbow, and even EA’s Strike series. There are few things more pleasurable to me in videogames than being able to take control of an AH-64 Apache and blowing the crap out of unsuspecting targets.