Thankfully, missions unlock sporadically instead of chronologically when completing earlier levels, which means that you can skip past frustrating stages and return to them later. The core campaign has 16 missions on offer (not including the obligatory training one) that range from cakewalk easy to hair-pulling difficult (even on Training mode). The pitch-perfect soundtrack adds a cool level of badassery to the military proceedings, while the radio battle chatter drags you further into the game. Whether we were following a convoy along a windy road, reigning death and destruction on a rebel encampment or moving from point A to B we were totally engrossed. Bottom line, damage in this game is taken seriously.Īll of this adds to the myriad levels of immersion in Apache: Air Assault. For instance, taking damage to your main rotor doesn’t make you explode straight away instead, you may notice some irregular wonkiness in how it’s spinning and will gradually lose altitude over time. There were also some odd hit-detection fails where we were able to fly our helicopter through tree tops, but everything else about the physics engine was top notch particularly the damage modelling that can quickly affect the handling of your chopper. Things don’t look as pretty up close, but considering the fast pace the combat played out for us, this wasn’t an overly noticeable detraction. Realistic difficulty is a much trickier affair that requires you to have masterful thumb control as you find those perfect sweet spots between the pitch/roll of your left joystick and the elevation/yaw of your right joystick.Īll of your in-flight time is complemented by some genuinely impressive long-range graphics and a realistic physics engine.
#Apache air assault game review simulator#
It does feel as though there’s a difficulty level missing-a ‘medium’ equivalent that logically exists between Training and Realistic-but it does also neatly split the game in two in terms of accessibility and the in-depth simulator for the hardcore console gamer. This is a smart move by Gaijin, as it opens the flight sim up to a wider market of gamers, while simultaneously inviting them to gain confidence in the easier mode before flicking the difficulty switch. Training difficulty is like flying an Apache with the training wheels attached converting a realistic game into more of an arcade shooter, widening the overall appeal. Sure, it may be a simulator with all of the real-world flight physics that this genre of game entails, but you can start out in the aptly named ‘Training’ difficulty level to get into the swing of things. Now Gaijin has wound the clock forward and shifted that front-facing prop to the top of their aircraft, using the AH-64 Apache as their titular gunship in this contemporary flight simulator. And yet, despite this obstacle, Gaijin Entertainment took the heralded IL-2 Sturmovik franchise to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 with the critically praised Birds of Prey game in 2009. They applied for shared custody of the real-time strategy genre and we laughed but they have had some minor victories in the form of voice control (EndWar) and the mouse-like motion control of Move (R.U.S.E.).ĭriving games aside, the simulator-specifically the flight simulator-doesn’t translate well to a console on paper for a massive practical reason: the lack of buttons on a controller. When they adopted the first-person shooter, we didn’t think much of it and then they went and revolutionised our beloved genre with locational damage in GoldenEye 007. Of all the gaming genres that we PC-loving peeps have had to watch jump the fence into the colourful candy land otherwise known as Console-ville, the simulator makes the least sense.