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Publisher:  Genre: Flight Sim
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Mac OS X: 10.2 Mac OS Classic: Not Supported
CPU: G3 @ 600 MHz RAM: 256 MB Hard Disk: 350 MB 4x CD-ROM Graphics: 16 MB VRAM |
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Enemy Engaged: Comanche vs. Hokum
January 20, 2005 | Tim Morgan |
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The radio becomes a very important tool if a player wants to be fully involved in his/her mission. In addition to transmitting battlefield reconnaissance and issuing commands, the radio allows the player to assign air and ground missions by calling for air strikes or ground support on specific targets. This, as it stands, is the only way the player can influence the course of the campaign by creating missions. If the player wants to direct the course of the campaign, he/she must do so in the seat of a helicopter, and as you may guess, helicopters make lousy forward air controllers (FAC’s), serving in this role as slow and expensive targets.
Your copilot also speaks to you, ranging from useful kill confirmations (“Target hit!”) to simply vocalizing the action the player just took (“Switching to cannon”). Because each side has only one copilot voice and a small selection of radio voices, they can become repetitive quickly.
Flying a helicopter could produce some fatigue without appropriate use of trim and autopilot, and Enemy Engaged provides both. The autopilot flies the helicopter from one waypoint to the next, and although it maintains an unrealistically heavy hand on the controls, it never crashes the helicopter — even when it obviously would had the player input the same commands. A common example is mid-air collisions — when a wingman clumsily attempts to get into position, it can sometimes bump into the player, causing disaster, but not if the autopilot is on, in which case the collision goes ignored. The autopilot also scares easily, oftentimes screeching to a halt to avoid obstacles that aren’t in its path.
Wingman AI is acceptable but could be improved. The main feature of the modern helicopter, its concealed standoff attack, sometimes goes unnoticed by the AI choppers, which make often silly attempts to hide themselves or reduce their profile. With total focus, the player can coordinate pop-up attacks with his/her wingman over the radio, but doing so while maintaining control of one’s own helicopter is no small feat. This sort of coordination is best left for multiplayer games when players can be in earshot of each other.
Flying low and slow requires an attention to hitboxes, the invisible surfaces that the computer uses to determine if your aircraft has collided with another object. And while most of the time collisions can be written off to an inattention to the size of the helicopter’s rotor blades, every so often an oversized hitbox causes a collision where none should have been. And on the opposite side, power lines (arguably the helicopter’s worst enemy) have no ill effect in the game.
Damage modeling in the game is passable as well. A number of problems can plague your helicopter should a missile explode near you or should you simply accidentally brush your belly against the grass (which happened to me quite a bit more often). And while the damage is varied and interesting (racing home on a leaky fuel tank is about thirty times scarier in a whirlybird than in a fast-mover), control systems damage is only manifested as jerkiness in one or more axes (you can even watch your avatar’s hands or legs spasm). Should all else fail, Hokum pilots are blessed with an ejection seat accompanied with a cinematic animation of the sequence when the lever is pulled.
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