Brave New World
SAR4 does pretty well on the low altitude flying all in all. There’s plenty to look at and most of it’s put together in a way that, while it isn’t worth putting on the wall, it is definitely better than acceptable and will also rush past you in a pretty unsettling way if you’re absolutely pegging it at 50’. This is something that a lot of other flight sims really fall down on – including (IMHO) the Enemy Engaged series where you can be flying 20’ off the ground with very little sense of speed. Now, it’s been a while since I’ve been in a helicopter so I can’t remember exactly how fast 90 mph feels when you’re at 200’ but I can’t help feeling that I had a slightly better sense of really getting somewhere instead of hanging about up there while the ground passed languorously below me. I know that this is on a bit of a tangent but something that all parachutists know is that you can see individual blades of grass at 200’ and is one of the ways you know when you’re getting near the ground (with the chute open that is – if you can see blades of grass with the chute closed then it probably doesn’t matter) so I think that maybe someone should look at the Novalogic Voxel system again as it was pretty good for a lot of things (F22 Lightning being not being among them) and having those Voxelised blades of grass appear at 200’ would definitely give good sense of altitude. The trees, at least, are of a realistic height unlike a certain, rather serious flight sim where every tree seems to be about 150’ tall.
The mission maps are relatively small, at least in relation to a game like Comanche v Hokum, where the maps are a couple of hundred miles or so across. The mission maps in SAR 4 are 20nm x 20nm and while this doesn’t seem all that huge an area on paper you’ll find that it’s more than sufficient for the purposes of the game. There is a time jump function that expands the playing areas by starting you off in one map and then after flying a few miles you jump to another, it’s a bit annoying as the maps take 30 seconds or so to load but it’s better (in my opinion) than just flying in a straight line for 45 minutes. IAV state that they work on restricted-size maps so that they can put more detail into the landscape as a lot of the game revolves around finding and working with something relatively small i.e. a person. Sounds fair enough to me and I have to say that I think that they’ve done a great job. The landscape textures are very good and the buildings in the game are pretty detailed and realistic, also cars can be seen driving along the roads (which have quite convincing markings on them). With my set-up - a pretty good, but not spectacular, rig (more detail below) - the game runs very smoothly indeed, I have had a couple of jerks here and there but they tend to leave when the pizza’s all gone, and mostly it’s silky-smooth all the way. I have noticed a few graphical anomalies in the game such as in certain areas you get a floating outline of the hills that kind of drops down onto the landscape but it’s not that common and not terribly distracting overall. For a game of this amount of detail I’m pretty amazed that there aren’t more bugs (I refer to exhibits a) Hidden and Dangerous and b) Operation Flashpoint, yeronna). Most of the bits and pieces that usually get overlooked if a game is rushed (poor or missing animations etc.) haven’t been so it looks as though IAV have done a pretty thorough job. I did notice though that on the Vietnam Med Evac demo you still have two fuel flow levers (i.e. one for each engine) on a Huey which should only have one - a little thing, I know but just very slightly disappointing - it certainly didn’t ruin the experience for me.
