Check out my Chopper!
I have to say that I sometimes get the feeling that this is not so much a game as a collection of nice touches, all sort of woven together into something game-like. For example – and I really like this – if you land somewhere populated, people will come out of their houses etc. to gawp at you, stand around for a bit, get bored, and wander off again. The animations on the landing gear are also very nice, and the rotor wash effects are quite pretty, and the sound effects are good, and when you pick up a bunch of people you can hear them talking in the background, and there are smoke stacks around to indicate wind direction … and … and … well … lots of stuff anyway. You really do get the feeling that a lot of thought has gone into this game, although one thing that I guess was meant to be a nice touch but has the actual effect of giving me the absolute willies is where you land the ‘copter too close to a person (this can be difficult to avoid sometimes as they do have a tendency to mill around in a very annoying fashion) and you get this tortured scream as though you’ve just stuck them up the wossname with a rotor blade instead of merely waving the rotor blades a little to close overhead (rotor wash). As this usually happens when you’re trying to land somewhere really tricky (i.e. on the deck of a ship) it’s very difficult to keep your concentration on the job and instead just lose it and drive straight into the deck.
Moving onto probably the most important aspect of the game, which is, in my opinion, the Flight Model (FM), after all if this is useless you might as well not bother. I have never flown a real helicopter … yet … so I am judging this on hearsay, comparisons with other helo sims and common sense but the FM seems pretty good to me. Pretty much all of the important things seem to have been modelled: ground effect, autorotation, over-torque, retreating blade stall and, according to the manual gyroscopic precession, although it’s difficult to tell whether it is actually doing anything. Two fairly significant aspects of helicopter flight seem to have been omitted and they are the Vortex Ring, which means that if you descend too quickly with too little forward speed turbulence flowing upwards through the rotor disc robs you of lift and you find that you have to slow your descent with the aid of the ground – usually fatally, and Translational Lift which means that when you have forward speed the whole rotor disc acts a large wing and gives you lift over and above that purely gained through the downward thrust from the individual rotor-blades, this would be useful as gaining height while at the same time getting up speed in order to get to the hospital in time to save the victim can be a real balancing act. Those aspects aside the simulation is still pretty convincing and, lets face it, all simulations end up forgetting something or other (no autorotation in the Razorworks games, and no rotor in Gunship! for example) I don’t know why because God knows they have enough other games to refer to, they could make a checklist. I put it down to either pure laziness or possibly the fact that in order to make one effect work well others have to be abandoned.
