It’s been more years than I care to remember since Microprose’s Gunship on the Amiga turned me into an attack chopper pilot, and almost as many since Core Design tempted PlayStation gamers everywhere to don a flight suit for Firestorm: Thunderhawk 2. For some reason combat chopper games have been few and far between on the last couple of generations of consoles, and it’s been open-world games such as GTAs San Andreas and IV, Saints Row 2 and most recently Just Cause 2 that have made the use of them an exciting prospect if not almost mandatory. FPS like Frontlines: Fuel of War and Bad Company 2 have included choppers as additional firepower but none have really tried to simulate realistically what kind of havoc an Apache and its crew are capable of wreaking. So in swoops Apache Air Assault (AAA?) from Gaijin Entertainment (makers of the excellent IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey) all guns, missiles and rocket pods blazing – and probably making a cool wokka~wokka~wokka sound too.

I was mildly concerned when I saw at the start of the game that there are only two settings; “Training” and “Realistic.” Now my abilities in most games usually fall somewhere inbetween “clueless n00b-numpty” and “ninja-24/7-gamerpointswhore-addict” so having only the two choices made for an uncomfortable start. Leaping into the first training mission on “Realistic” soon made me decide that there was in fact only one choice, as I think a General or someone would have soon been on the phone asking “who’s the goddamn kamikaze who keeps trashing my Apaches”?

Playing AAA on “Realistic” for the first few missions decided for me that, even though it releases the shackles of the flight model and allows you to swoop around faster and even do barrel rolls, life is just too short to crash that many times for no apparent reason. The Apache is a powerful but heavy chopper in real life and at times feels like an F1 car, the problem is, it's an F1 car with no brakes and when you want to turn quickly or slow down it feels more like an 18-wheeler with flat tyres, and so I wussed out and restarted the campaign on “Training.” It wasn’t long before this proved to be a wise decision as the game seems to have regular Call of Duty-esque moments where the level designers just decide that you’ve been having far too much fun blasting tangos to bits from miles away and piles on the agony with completely insane numbers of enemies that seem to spawn out of thin air; ground troops appear literally from nowhere, convoys of APCs and tanks stream over the horizon and enemy Hinds (Russian attack choppers that are even better armed and armoured than Apaches) zoom in firing rockets and missiles, and they all want to kill you, even if you have two or three AI Apaches to help you out. A constant problem seems to lie with the realistic flight model and the fact that while you’re happily gunning away through the DVO the Apache likes to wander off and back itself into the nearest hillside or tree (you of course don’t have that ‘seat of the pants’ feeling to warn you of wander), and the “auto hover” on the ‘L3’ click works, but only ‘sort-of’, and doesn’t bring the Apache to a halt quickly enough for comfort. You also have to point the nose of the Apache down to fire rockets at a ground target (which is of course not the case with the real thing) and means you’ll often start heading towards a target when you really didn’t want to, and also makes for some exciting but dangerous low-level flying as you try and unload as many rockets onto the enemy as possible in one sweep.

While it’s a tough bird the Apache isn’t indestructible and with so much ordnance flying around going down in a flaming wreck is a regular occurrence. Sometimes however the Apache will have one engine out, or boom (tail rotor) damage or something non-terminal, but still be unable to keep altitude. Realistic as it may be this has left us on more than one occasion in the strange position of having nowhere to rearm and repair and because the Apache is so down on power and manoeuvrability there’s no way of finishing the mission, so you have to kamikaze to respawn another copter (you get 4 retries per mission.) At other times you’ll go into an unrecoverable spin or begin to lose altitude, at this moment you realise that while the flight model might feel realistic there’s no auto rotation ability coded into the game (the ability for a helicopter to “glide” in without power from its engines and use the rotor blades’ lift to slow its descent and land in a controlled manner), so once you start to lose power and altitude chances are you’re dead. The lack of checkpoints or their placement is also sometimes infuriating; on one particular mission I kept getting to the same point near the end of the mission and dying, which meant restarting the mission all over again. This got silly when a missile that was in the air killed the final enemy just as he shot me down, meaning another fail and another 10 minutes or so to fight my way back to where I was.

The game sounds really good with plenty of gung-ho radio chatter between allied forces and meaty explosions, rocket blasts and missiles whooshing this way and that. If you play from the chase cam you hear the Apache’s rotor noise too, but it seems to be rather too damped and even missing sometimes if you play from the gunner or pilot cockpit views. I can believe that the crew’s helmet insulates them from a lot of the racket but sometimes you can’t hear a thing from the engine or the rotor blades, which seems unrealistic. There’s also a really good but rather overused heroic orchestral score that does a great job of accompanying the action, for a while at least.

The online mode consists of 13 Squad Ops missions for 2-4 players each in their own aircraft. These are good fun but you have the same limited number of lives and the same difficulty spikes as the solo campaign, so any chance of ever completing them is spoiled unless you can get a buddy to play them through with you as most players seem to have one go then disappear from the lobby never to be seen again. This mode also introduces a couple of new aircraft; the Hind-D and the Fire Scout. The Hind is known as “the flying tank” and carries a huge payload of rockets and missiles. The Fire Scout missions are fun as you sit back and watch most of the action and just laser designate targets for the Apaches to destroy. Squad Ops can be played solo (perhaps they figured how few people would keep playing it) but I’d say that solo chances of success on some missions are slim to none, and slim is out of town.

Several of our other Gamecell guys had numerous attempts at this mission and declared it “impossible,” and more frequently “f*$£ing annoying.” This mission above all underlines that it’s a shame that the game designers didn’t make up their minds what they wanted AAA to be; I don’t see how, even if they do auto-reload after a while, you can have realistic weapon loadouts (8 Hellfires, 38 rockets and just 4 air to air missiles) and cascades of enemies with unlimited ammo all pointing at you, often with impossible marksmanship. I’ve been looking for targets and been hit by a guy with no more than what appears to be a basic AK-47 from 1.2km away – no mean achievement I’m sure you’ll agree. I don’t see how you can have a really convincing flight model and yet lock the Apache to a flight ceiling lower than that of your enemy, meaning they can just fly higher than you making it very difficult to aim a weapon at them. Too often what started out as a complete joy to play and improve at becomes an annoyingly predictable matter of running away until your weapons are rearmed thanks to some ridiculously over-aware and effective enemy AI.

If this review sounds like a list of gripes, whinges and complaints and a warning to avoid at all costs then I’ve got it totally wrong. I’d like you to play the game as I think it has huge potential as a long-lived franchise on consoles as the genre is virtually non-existent anymore, and I’d also like developers Gaijin to release some DLC missions for Apache as I really enjoyed some of the less insane ones—but they should also have the awareness to do a patch with the difficulty sorted for normal mortals, or at least a single mission where you get to blow the living crap out of Gaijin's studio. Either would do me fine.