Gunship! Review

Microprose, the very company that released Falcon 4.0, setting new standards in combat simulations, published a combat chopper simulation with some strategic elements, which already became a common thing in combat flight simulations.

The game is shipped on one CD, and requires 150MB hard drive space for basic installation as well as DirectX7, which can be installed from the game CD. From this point on everything is perfect...

Mission accomplished!

Another busy day comes to end...

The graphically and stylistically perfect menus are followed by the only music theme in the game. This is quite all right because most of the serious "Pilots" turn the music off during the game anyway. The missions are sufficiently dynamic to prevent you from thinking about the lack of music and besides that, the music would interfere with the radio that is often crucial for survival.

Just like any other good flight simulation, GUNSHIP! has training missions with detailed briefings. The training missions are very good and they will provide all the knowledge and exercise you need to successfully play the rest of the game. You are able to make the flight instructor repeat lessons until you get them right. You can fly the training missions on one of the three levels: EASY, ADVANCED or REALISTIC, the last two being very close to the real physical model. Do not think for a moment that it's too hard to crash the chopper when playing in the EASY mode, but as this is an excellent simulation, it offers a solution to that problem too.

Once you feel ready to ride, you can start one of the 5 campaigns and watch the intro that introduces you to the plot: The Russian nationalism is at its peak after the Chechnya conflict, so Russians start provoking the western countries on the Polish border. NATO reacts instantly forming a defense force consisting out of American (2 corpuses), French, British and German (1 corpus each) troops, and places them in Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia. You can choose to play one of the allies or the Russians. The Flight model is much the same regardless of the side you pick, even though your choice will determine if you will fly an AH-64 Apache, Westland Apache, Eurocopter Tigre or Mil-28 Havoc. The main difference between the choppers is the visual appearance of their cockpits, which is OK because once you have learned how to command one chopper you will be able to fly all of them without having to take four different tutorials. Apart from the campaign you can choose to play the separate missions, twenty of them, four of which were created for multiplaying purposes only.

The missions load up quickly and leave you in the command center to determine the flight route parameters, which are the key to success in all missions, and then equip and man the choppers at your own discretion. You never fly the mission alone; there is always at least one supporting unit. Your support have absolutely no initiative - they always follow your orders, which is quite useful because you are always outnumbered so you will have to beat your enemies using good organization and skillful maneuvering. The supporting units are controlled through a menu system that appears when you press the TAB key. Using the same menus you can call for ground support (usually 155mm field guns) by linking the data about the discovered stationary enemy units to your support guns, and then clear off before they start firing. You can always correct the sent data if the effects were unsatisfactory or if you misplaced targeting points. All of this is, of course, useless when you have to confront distant or mobile units.

Some of the most important things in a chopper simulation are the terrain and the objects on it. You have to agree that this genre requires the terrain and objects to be highly detailed and realistic, still, without causing system overload. GUNSHIP! fulfills these requirements completely and this is where it proves to be far better than any other chopper simulation. This has partially been achieved by imposing some other restrictions that fortunately have no effect on the gameplay. The terrain is vivid, versatile and looks quite natural with all its lakes, rivers swamps, forests, cities and villages. Most of the objects are dynamic - if you fire a rocket at a cornfield it will star burning, you can destroy trees to get a clear shot at the units hiding in the forest (if you have sufficient ammunition, that is). The ground units will have no trouble moving around forests, streets and fields and using these objects as cover and for maneuvering. You will have a hard time trying to eliminate enemy units hidden in the forest, especially if it is an infantry unit carrying light air-defense. They are hard to spot even when using the thermo vision that can identify mechanized units from decent distances of about four miles.

Cool, isn't it?

More weapons more fun.

The next great thing is that the second joystick button functions as "helmet sight" system, i.e. while holding it you use the joystick to move your head inside the cockpit instead of the whole chopper. This is very useful when flying at HELLFIRE-range from your enemies and use your helmet to lockdown targets, one by one. This mode lets you zoom in on the terrain in search of the enemy units. These maneuvers will require a steady hand and a lot of luck with the wind.

The game allows you to make your cockpit semi- or completely transparent. If you choose the last option your field of vision covers the entire screen and you can place the map and pointers at the bottom of the display.

Using weaponry and equipment is fairly simple and sufficiently automatic, which is not at all bad because you will be extremely occupied with navigating the craft, choosing and shooting targets down, and avoiding enemy fire. Weapons and equipment efficiency and reliability can be set from the options menu. When you choose to play on the REALISTIC level everything will act frighteningly true to life. For instance, you will be able to spend an entire Hellfire set on a single SAM site with absolutely no results. And you can well imagine what follows an action like that... You are not required to return to the home base after completing your mission. I also have to notice that, just like most of the games in this genre, GUNSHIP! lacks dynamic missions, meaning that you will either complete all your tasks in given order or lose the game and have to start all over again. This is a common combat simulation disease, and programmers avoid curing it because it could prove to be an excessive operation.

Oh, and another thing: If you choose to fly the German Eurocopter Tiger, all radio communication will be in German, which is fun and improves the atmosphere. The same goes for Russian and American choppers, but don't worry you can always turn this off and listen to some proper English, or even if you decide to leave it on you will have the English subtitles on top of the screen.

What else is there to be said about GUNSHIP!? There still are a lot of things to be mentioned, but as I have restricted space I guess that you should just try the game out. It'll tell you more than any review.

All I can recommend you is: play GUNSHIP!, it's really worth it.

Multiplayer Support:
Nowadays, it is almost unimaginable to create a good, single-player-only game, so GUNSHIP! simply had to be equipped with a multiplayer option. In my personal opinion, this game is absolutely fantastic in the multiplayer mode; the only problem is that not many players are likely to play this type of a game. The authors promised they would integrate the multiplayer mode of their newest project "Tank Platoon" with GUNSHIP! letting two types of players fight on the same field! The game supports all the standard connection types including dial-up connections with rates 28.8Kbps or higher.

What you get for your money:
"GUNSHIP!" is a great combat chopper simulation/strategy with some revolutionary novelties. Its only drawback is the lack of dynamic missions, yet if we consider the number of games in this genre that have them, we may only conclude that it is not much of a drawback.

PLAY GUNSHIP!