Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: koren@fc.hp.com (Steve Koren) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Gunship 2000 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Date: 29 Jul 1993 14:49:43 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 320 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <238o27$fgu@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: koren@fc.hp.com (Steve Koren) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: game, simulation, helicopter, commercial PRODUCT NAME Gunship 2000 (henceforth, "GS2K") BRIEF DESCRIPTION GS2K is helicopter combat simulator by MicroProse. If you are at all a flight simulator fan, get this game. 'Nuff said. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Microprose Address: Unit 1 Hampton Road Industrial Estate Tetbury, Glos. GL8 8LD UK LIST PRICE $50 (US). Mail order prices are cheaper. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS 1 MB RAM if run from floppies. 1.5 MB RAM if run from a hard drive. (I recommend this because the game comes on 4 floppies.) COPY PROTECTION GS2K is hard disk installable and protected via keyword lookup in the manual. You only have to do this once, and it is quite tolerable. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING The game was tested on an Amiga 4000 running AmigaDOS 3.0 with 18 MB of RAM. INSTALLATION AND SYSTEM FRIENDLINESS Microprose did not use the standard AmigaDOS Installer utility, but made their own. Theirs offers me some strange things, such as the choice of installing the software on my tape drive, but otherwise works OK. The game supports an analog joystick, which is quite preferable to keyboard or digital joystick control. GS2K multitasks fairly well, except that it rather rudely insists on closing down your Workbench screen before it loads. If you have other workspaces open or have a hotkey to instantiate one, these will work fine after the game is loaded. In fact, I have GS2K running right now as I type this review into Emacs, with the only noticeable effect being the repetitious music. It helps to lower the task priority of the game though. THE GAME There are several phases to GS2K. Initially, you are a novice pilot who must complete flight training before being qualified to fly combat missions. In flight training, you are supposed to learn the to fly the helicopter (or "copter"), operations of the weapons systems, etc. Enemy fire has no effect on your helicopter in this mode. After training, you are qualified for combat ops. There are 8 total helicopters in the game which you can fly: the AH-64A Apache, The AH-64B Longbow Apache, the AH-1W SuperCobra, the AH-66A Comanche (2 versions), the OH-58D Kiowa Scout, the UH-60K Blackhawk, and the AH-6D Defender. However, you can't fly the better equipment until you prove yourself in combat. Each helicopter has its own selection of weapons, and picking the right copter for the job can be important. Each copter has its own features and cockpit layout (the cockpits look quite nice). After flying a certain number of single-helicopter operations, you can graduate to controlling a flight of 5 copters, divided into a heavy section of 3, and a light section of 2. There is a primary and a secondary objective to each mission, and you can send one section after the primary and one after the secondary, send both sections to either objective, or any other combination. You have some limited control over the individual helicopters; you can give them destinations, and commands such as "hold position", "land", "disengage from combat", "rejoin formation", etc. They also have some degree of independence: they will attack targets of opportunity or defend themselves against aggression. You can review the systems status of each copter, including damage, remaining weapons, remaining fuel, and cargo. This can be important when deciding which member of a flight to send into a dangerous situation, or whether to send a critically wounded flight member back to base early. By controlling the paths of helicopters, you can use terrain as a shield when approaching a combat area. You can use tactics such as safely landing your gas-guzzling and cargo-laden Blackhawk helicopters behind the shelter of a hill while your Apache Gunships sweep the landing zone to eliminate any opposition. Scouts can be used to supply remote target designation for hidden gunship. During combat, you can jump to an outside view of any helicopter to see what it is doing. You can take an active part in combat operations in your helicopter, or just fly in to a spot near the battle, park safely behind a hill, and tell your other flight members what to do. Other flight members will fill you in on their actions, such as "I'm engaging target", or "Primary objective sighted". Your flight members all have skill levels, and loosing one in combat gets you a new rookie to train from scratch. Experienced pilots are tolerably but not exceptionally intelligent. They are, however, almost too brave in the face of insurmountable odds. COMBAT Combat is quite well done. Weapons are modeled well, both yours and the enemies. You are able to fight with better weapons systems as you gain combat experience. These can make a critical difference in the battle: getting good fire-and-forget weapons instead of helicopter-guided ones can tilt the table in your favor. Proper use of terrain is a must. If you simply charge into battle with an armored unit, guns blazing, you are not likely to last very long, especially with enemy skill set high. Instead, you must plan your attack carefully. One tactic is to hover behind some covering terrain such as a hillside or ridge, pop up over the top, launch a weapon, and dive as soon as the weapon has hit. This limits your exposure to hostile fire. This situation is, however, complicated by the fact that the bad guys will notice you and shoot back. With low skill opponents, it might take them 10 or more seconds to shoot back. With highly skilled opponents, they will have their shots off as quickly as you do. Thus, to avoid being hit you must dive behind cover early, meaning your shot was not guided in and is likely to miss its target. Since ordinance is quite limited, this can be a major problem. Other problems involve getting close enough for a targeting solution - often you must fly between two hills with no protection from the terrain, making you a sitting duck for SAMs or AA fire. In this situation it is tempting to fly straight for the things which are shooting at you, but this is usually not wise. Your copilot helps out by calling out things like "incoming right!", or "target left!". Before a crash he will also say, "We're going in!" Also, stereo sound effects are supported, so you can often hear which direction a missile is coming from even before you see it. There are a wealth of little details in combat taken care of which make the game seem much more realistic. For some examples: - Speed of various missiles is modeled accurately. If you fire a fast weapon, it will get there sooner, thus giving you more time to hide before incoming weapons can reach you. Even your cannon rounds take a little time to travel a kilometer and a half. - Bad guys turn to face their current target. On the weapons camera, I once watched a SAM unit turn to face my wingman who was a little distance away, then turn again 50 degrees to face me and fire. Often you can even tell when they have a weapon loaded. - Sometimes if you are hovering just peeking over a hill, the bad guys won't pick you up on radar. However, if you fire and don't destroy them, they will immediately turn to the direction your shot came from to look for you, and then fire. This is the kind of simple feature that adds realism but is missing from many other games. - If an incoming missile misses you, it will often detonate when it hits a hill or ridge in front of or behind you, making a nice explosion and sending fragments flying. If it is close, it will also shake up your helicopter a bit. It is a nice effect. - If you shoot down a helicopter, its wreckage will fall down and you can go fly by it later :-) The set of possible missions is quite large. There are various kinds of enemy tank or armored groups to destroy. There are ground targets such as oil storage sheds, refineries, ammo depots, parked aircraft, trains, etc. There missions to rescue downed pilots, or drop off supplies or troops into a battle zone. If your objective is capable of moving, it probably _has_ moved since you left base, and you must go search for it. Fuel can become a problem in this case, especially for heavy helicopters such as the Blackhawk. There are sometimes "FARP" (Forward Aiming and Refueling Points) available, but careful fuel management is necessary. Most weapons systems are, IMHO, a bit too accurate - they never are duds and they never seem to miss (assuming they have guidance all the way into the target - they _do_ miss otherwise). Also, many helicopters are equipped with a weapon which a friend of mine aptly calls "The Gun of God". The cannon seems capable of destroying almost anything with a single 20 round burst, and it _never_ misses. (This is only true of the cannon on the better copters. The smaller guns aren't quite that effective). There are very few targets which can withstand more than one burst from this cannon. TERRAIN The maps seem to be dynamically generated for each mission (or at least I have not seen the same map twice in over 30 missions). Terrain features are quite varied, and include various hills, canyons, rivers, trenches, buildings, etc. There are lots of little details such as animals, billboards, bridges, and many other things. The terrain uses polygon mountains. Often there is a road down the middle of a wall of mountains on each side, and these are great fun to fly down to use as cover. In the European theater, there are railroad tunnels which you can fly through (carefully!). There are railroads complete with signals, highways, houses, churches, airports, etc. In fact, just exploring can be a good deal of fun. In spite of all this detail, the game runs superbly fast. Even with 3 or 4 other helicopters in view, several hills, half a dozen enemy units, and a few houses and runways, the frame rate is still incredibly fast. Although I have not tried the game on a slower system, I suspect it will run just fine on a 68020, and possibly even a 68000. In fact, the response is so quick that I think they could have done a 640x400 version for the A4000 and possibly the A1200. With the higher graphics bandwidth of those machines, it should easily be possible. Right now we don't see such things since they want to run on low end systems as well; but once the base-line system moves up to the A1200, perhaps we'll see more of this sort of thing. FLIGHT MODEL The flight model has its strong and weak points. It models the interaction of the collective, aircraft orientation, etc., fairly well. Pitching up to slow down will often leave you exposed 600 feet higher unless you simultaneously back off on the collective control. Slowing rapidly without gaining altitude with the realistic flight mode is a trick which must be mastered. In theory, the game claims to support rotor detachment and auto-rotation, but I've never been able to accomplish this without crashing. On the other hand, there are many problems with the flight model. The speed limit (135 knots for most helicopters) is artificially "hard". Acceleration seems too rapid. You can drop like a rock from 1000 feet, then increase collective and be in a hover almost instantaneously - a feat which, even if it were possible, would result in the damage or destruction of a real helicopter. (In other words, it doesn't model momentum.) The relationship between pitch and collective is not taken into account below a certain speed - this makes slow speed maneuvering _much_ easier, but is a bit unrealistic. Taking off with heavy loads doesn't seem any harder than with light loads, and the helicopter seems just as maneuverable. It is also artificially easy to hover or maintain a perfectly level flight. In many respects, the helicopter in ArmourGeddon actually had a more realistic flight model, although GS2K's does simplify gameplay; for example, it was _really_ hard to hover well in the ArmourGeddon helicopter. Also, GS2K does not let you pitch or roll beyond a certain amount. Even with all these problems, however, it's likely that only hardcore flight-sim fanatics would appreciate a model more realistic than GS2K has. (There is also an even easier model available in the game, in which, for example, slowing down without adjusting collective doesn't make you gain altitude.) DAMAGE The damage system is weak. There are a dozen or so systems that can go wrong with your helicopter: things like rotor damage, fuel leaks, weapons systems failure, etc. However, a hit by an enemy missile usually just results in failure of a single system. Thus, even after being hit by 5 or 6 SAMs, you can still be flying. I have trouble imagining a helicopter ("collection of parts flying in close formation") surviving even one moderate sized SAM, so this stretches the imagination a little. I have taken to counting a mission as a "success" if I get hit 0 or 1 times, and a failure otherwise, but the game is quite lenient here. I realize that for novice players this is a nice feature, but it would be even nicer if experienced players could turn on a realistic battle damage mode. There is also an "auto-hover" mode which puts you in a nice, level hover, but I consider that the same as cheating. :-) SOUND General use of sound was discussed above. Sound quality is not bad, but it is not nearly in the same league as the incredible sound in Birds of Prey, for example. The rotor sample is good enough to avoid being overly annoying, but it could be better. The engine sound suffers from a case of "SoundBlasterism", sounding FM-synthesized instead of being a nice sampled turbine engine. The sounds of explosions scale aptly with their distance from you, as do sounds of other helicopters and any missiles in the vicinity. Stereo is supported; you can tell whether something is to the left, right, or fore/aft by the location of the sound. The sound could be better. It could also be a lot worse. Unfortunately, the game seems rather insistent about turning on the Amiga's lowpass filter. This is annoying. However, you can start a task before hand which, on the press of a hotkey, invokes the program to turn the filter back off. Then you can press this key right before you enter the cockpit, to get around the game which has just turned the filter on. This improves the sound quality. BUGS The game seems to have few bugs. There is an annoying mouse handling bug in the screen in which you pick weapons for the mission. This can supposedly be fixed by killing any processes which act as mouse accelerators before running the game. About once in 20 missions, the game will crash my system in mid-flight, which is annoying. The auto-pilot dumps collective when you turn it off, causing a sudden and usually catastrophic loss of altitude. Other that that, it seems pretty robust. CONCLUSIONS I haven't had quite this much fun playing a game since Armour Geddon. Even with its limitations such as a partially-bogus flight model, it is still a lot of fun. You must be willing to spend some time in order to get good at it - it isn't something you can master in one flight. But it should appeal to any simulation fan. Re-playability is high since maps and missions seem to be dynamically generated (or at least there is a huge number of them). You don't get bored with the same old terrain, and you have to figure out new strategies for each mission. I give this game a score of 9 out of a possible 10. Get it. Its fun. Steve Koren 303-226-4985 (evenings, weekends) koren@fc.hp.com (email) --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews