vortex

An easy going game that gets where no civil simulator has gone before: Getting a story and drama mixed with the flying around. The game's easy going and the campaign pretty much takes you from total novice to feeling yourself pretty much in control of the different choppers, which is pretty much to say. The game also puts you in a great deal of the real situations chopper pilots face in their day to day operations, but spicing them with the interest of the story-driven campaign. This keeps the interest up and will surely meet the needs of users that are attracted to flight sims but keep their distance because of this type of games difficulty and lack of objective. The visuals are just gorgeous and the terrains, while constraint to 'just' 20 thousand square kilometers of Seattle and South Asia territory, are more than enough (after all, we're not flying supersonic jets but helicopters: Much less speed and altitude). Regarding the flight model... After several thousand hours using simulators with realistic flight models (and that excludes FSX for the sake of choppers), I can say that the different difficulty levels excel in allowing you to face a flight model that can go from *very* realistic (and thus, a hell of a challenge to master) to *very* comfortable (while keeping the sensation you're in a sim and not in a fast paced simplified arcade). What I also found really fantastic is that the game can be enjoyed with just keyboard and mouse, but it will also accept a 360 pad and, of course, a full fledged joystick/throttle/pedals set up. It might need a little tampering with the joystick configuration, though, to get it working comfortably, as the initial settings for control sticks are a bit clumsy. So, basically, I found it a great game that offers very interesting perks to simulation fans (without pretending to be a hardcore simulator) and will engage players that are more casual sim players or even that are looking for "some place to start". Worth the while for sure.