| Team Apache
By Neil "Enzo" Mouneimne |
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 There's less than meets the eye The campaign mode for Team Apache falls woefully short of the mark. On the surface, the game appears to sport a real dynamic campaign, with all the replayability and unpredictability that sim players crave. But as soon as you try the campaign a second time, it becomes pretty clear that this is in fact merely a (cleverly disguised) "branching tree" of fixed missions. In fact, you could completely do away with the "real-time clock" altogether. It gives the impression that there is a real war going on 24 hours a day a la Falcon 4, but it is more pretense than anything else. Admittedly the campaign does have persistent damage - objects destroyed in one mission are still dead in the next - similar to the first Janes Longbow. The missions run the typical gamut of close air support, escort, and search and destroy missions, but a little interesting variety is added by including rescue, scramble, and kidnapping missions. Fortunately there is a competent mission builder to extend the game's playability, so at least it can compete with Su-27 Flanker and Hornet Korea in that regard.
The campaign does actually go beyond Longbow in its persistence. Where the latter may have had no significant degree of resource management, TA has an interesting variation. Crews energy and morale levels are a resource that must be only grudgingly used. Helicopters cannot be replaced during a campaign. Parts may come into short supply and get backordered. The energy levels of your maintenance crew must be monitored if you're bringing in busted up helicopters for them around the clock. It's even possible to have to fly a helicopter into battle that still has damage left over from your last escapade if things get too crazy. In light of this, it's odd that there is no resource management for weaponry. This omission is inconsistent with the rest of game considering that just about everything else is meticulously tracked. Of the various taskings, escort missions are a real exercise in frustration. The escorted craft fly much too fast to allow a careful approach to LZ. You have to burn your way at top speed to the target to give yourself enough time to defuse the LZ before the vulnerable Hueys or Blackhawks make their move. Pause even for a little bit to search jungle areas for soldiers inhabiting the flight corridor and next thing you know, the mission is a failure. With the impressive formation-keeping AI your teammates use, you would think that the craft you are escorting would be smart enough to stick close to their cover rather than take off alone. Indeed, Team Apache's style seems to encourage otherwise sloppy habits. By not including a time-skip feature, hamstringing the effectiveness of enemy SAM positions, totally omitting enemy early-warning radar, having high vulnerability to ground fire, and by having escorted craft fly very quickly Team Apache rewards flying high and fast - something that would get you very dead in many other sims (and most any real-world high-threat environment) in a hurry. This is not your father's Apache The damage modeling is totally different from what gamers normally expect from a gunship game. The good part is that crash damage is handled with an unprecented degree of detail. In a crash, you might bust one of your landing gear, shear off a wing, damage your tail rotor, or shed your main rotors completely. Exactly what happens makes perfect sense according to how you crash. This is much nicer to see than random damage or just "BOOM, You're Dead" like too many simulations model these days. For example, on one night mission, one Apache hit another from above. The rotors sheared off, and the otherwise undamaged fuselage fell to its destiny below - upon hitting, the fuse broke apart into many component pieces and the engine section burst into flames. Another misguided flight through a city had an Apache banking too hard at low altitude. Rotors sheared off, fuse landed hard on the right side, breaking off the right wing, right gear, and snapping the tail rotor, but it was otherwise intact. Very impressive.
Weapons damage modeling is quirky by comparison. For example, in Jane's Longbow fire from a .50 cal. heavy machine gun did not pose a serious threat unless you were careless. Even then, you would have plenty of warning as one subsystem after another would gradually get knocked out. In Team Apache, even small-arms fire is a deadly threat to your Apache. With all the manufacturer's claims that the Apache is stressed so that each component can endure a 23mm shell hit, it would seem that the TA helos are on the vulnerable side. On the other hand, at least the type of damage they take is logical with respect to ballistics: the direction the round comes from. It doesn't seem that any sim developers are going to have the chance to test fire assault rifles at multi-million dollar gunship to check their figures, so just keep in mind the difference between the games in this area. |
Also present in disturbing numbers is the mysterious "Golden BB". In fighter pilot lore, there is a saying that even a puny BB can kill you if it hits your aircraft just right. In Team Apache this seems to be literally true. Every once in a while, a single hit from even a small caliber weapon will knock you out of the sky. Unfortunately, the game never offers any sort of explanation. Your view shifts to an external view, arcade-style, and you see your Apache plunging to the ground unceremoniously. Whether you crashed because the rotor was shot up, both engines were knocked out, the crew was killed, or what-- is totally unclear. Don't assume that you can take being hit for a while and later limp back with a heavily damaged helicopter, one of those bullets is likely to be the BB with your name on it. So . . . How about them Atomizers? One of the touted features of Team Apache is literally the sense of team play, that it's not simply you against the world. You can fly up to six helicopters in paired-helo teams, and the other members of your team can really help pull you through. This works on some levels and fails on others. As commander, you can select from predesignated formations and alternates for your missions and switch between three different ones in flight. Also handy is the formation editor, which helps you arrange your firepower and rearguard to your own personal taste - a very nice touch. The wingman control interface is extremely simplified. You can issue various orders and queries to any of the teams or the entire group. You can order one team to hold position and wait as you set up a flank attank. One team can back up another to form a "heavy" team. If your own team is in bad shape, you can even order one of the others to take the lead and clear a safe path for you to get home.
It's the AI of your team members that is the mixed bag. On the plus side, they fly pretty realistically, as if "virtual pilots" are also dealing with real flight models - something that sim fans always like to see if the game can spare the CPU cycles. If you keep the team close together so they can provide overlapping fields of fire, you'll find that they do an excellent job of providing mutual cover. Carefully managed, they also rack up the kills - very close to your own score if you can keep everything under control. The real problems are when the teamwork starts to break down. In a target-rich environment, they seem to start running off like a bunch of yahoos after the nearest target, ignoring commands to rejoin. Worse yet, they tend to make extremely exposed attacks, putting themselves right into the heart of the multiple enemies' weapons envelopes - after which they'll yelp back plaintively for you to pull their fat out of the fire as they get tagged in the crossfire. All the hollering you can do over the radio seems to have little effect to try to keep the teams cohesive at these times.
Worse yet is the lousy flying of the pilots when they're tired. Tired pilots in night missions fly so bad that you'll get to the point where a mid-air collision is guaranteed. While this makes a certain amount of sense, it's to the point of being almost comical in the game. In general, your pilots work well when they fly as a team, but do very poorly on a purely individual level. The envelope, please The recurring theme in Team Apache is that there are plenty of hits and plenty of misses. Perhaps the most mystifying aspect of the game is that it seems like it can't make up it's mind whether it's an action game or a simulation. On one hand, the game can feel like it's competing with "Firebirds" in trying to create a sense of fast, reckless action (and damn the avionics!) with plenty of Hollywood-inspired cheesiness that tends to turn off serious sim players. On the other hand, solid physics, long and quiet transit phases, realistic target sighting, imperfect aiming, and brutal damage modeling tend to turn off the adrenalin-junkie set. For hardcore sim pilots, Longbow 2 is still the undisputed champ of the conventional gunship sims. However, Team Apache is far enough off the beaten trail that it is seriously worth considering. It's just one sim where managing your expectations is especially important. Action gamers interested in getting their feet wet in sims may want to play the campaign with most of the realism options off at first to make the transition as simple as possible. Team Apache's focus on simple avionics and fun gameplay makes it a very unintimidating sim as long as you can handle the relatively dull transits (in Latvia) and keep your distance from enemy ground fire. Sim-lite players - the proverbial Novalogic and Jetfighter III players - should get the most entertainment out of TA. It's a fun game whose foibles can be mostly overlooked by players unconcerned with high degrees of realism or dynamic campaigns. Yet it is just realistic enough to give the feeling that you're playing something much more sophisticated, and thus it has plenty of potential to help sim-lite players prepare for more challenging fare. COMBATSIM.COM RATING : 75 Core Rating : 35
(Author's note - this is a "gold release" review. If it comes to our attention that the retail boxed version is somehow different, an addendum will be made)
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Last updated July 12th, 1998 |
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