Subject: REVIEW: Gunship 2000
From: [email-masked] (Steve Koren)
Date: 29 Jul 1993 14:49:43 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

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)
[email-masked] (email)

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