Review by:Tony Mitera

Flying a helicopter in a combat zone is a ridiculously difficult mix of balancing and maneuvering an airborne chunk of metal while at the same time tracking and taking down targets. Apache: Air Assault lets you tackle that feat in all of its simulation glory or by putting on the training wheels and making the proceedings much more arcade-styled. Ultimately the game is a helicopter sim for both camps and manages to deliver a polished yet very narrowly focused experience.

While playing the game you can embark on missions in one of two ways: the easier Training mode or the aptly named Realistic or Veteran modes. The Training mode retools much of the controls to be somewhat idiot-proof in the sense that you practically have to try in order to lose control of your bird. This lets you concentrate more on lining up shots against targets, and unloading on them with a seemingly infinite ammunition supply. It’s a lot harder to die or crash in this mode and a lot more carefree, but it also makes the chopper handle sluggishly due to how much limited control you have.

The Realistic mode takes out all the stops, which at first means you get a lot of takeoffs immediately followed by careening back into the ground and exploding. The controls in this mode are incredibly unforgiving which makes for very frustrating gameplay at first, but as you gain experience using it you begin to pull off maneuvers far more quickly and nimbly than you even can in the Training mode. Of course this also means that damage to the helicopter is more accurate and your ammunition supply more reasonable; traits that are magnified even more so in the Veteran mode unlocked after you complete the game on Realistic.

Missions largely revolve around taking out ground targets at long range using the Apache’s signature ability to unleash a devastating flurry of rockets, missiles, and bullets. Objectives vary from mission to mission as do the enemies you face to some extent, but at the ranges that you are normally engaging them it can be hard to really get the impression that you are fighting anything other than a set of different red symbols on your HUD rather than soldiers, technicals, and tanks. Additionally, since you are always in some variant of an Apache it makes for a fairly shallow amount of differentiation from one mission to the next.

Not helping matters is the lack of an engaging plot or any real characters. The game’s barebones plot centers on three different Apache teams in different areas of the world taking down bad guys, and is delivered almost entirely via load screens. There’s a ton of radio chatter during missions but it quickly becomes difficult to point out exactly who is talking to whom, which one of those your character is supposed to be, and then cut through some of the military jargon used. This also has the side effect of making it difficult to figure out what exactly you need to do next at times, as even the map/objective screen can be awfully vague on the topic.