 |
 |
|
| Another one bites the dust | I can just make out a helicopter, can you? |
Enemy Engaged 2 follows up from the highly acclaimed Enemy Engaged: RAH-66 Comanche Versus Ka-52 Hokum. Although quite a mouthful, the first instalment in the series changed the way people viewed flight simulators and put the genre back on the map. The physics were spot on, the graphics certainly up to scratch for their time and a faithful, committed online gaming community who devised their own mods and maps all made it near perfect and it thoroughly deserved the accolades it received. Yes, back in the year 2000, life was sweet. Seven years on and it just turned sour.
It started off promisingly though. I mean, the opening title FMV was rather impressive. Helicopters flying low over cityscapes, enemy rockets closing in: the sound of the blades cutting their way through clouds as they swooped and dodged. Pretty exciting stuff! Cut to game menu and it all goes rapidly downhill. I’ll explain.
The short version is that it’s unplayable but for the sake of what’s considered all full review I’ll give you the long and boring version. Long and boring is a good place to start. The process of navigating to your cockpit is an arduous one. Select campaign, select mission, select team, select chopper, select map, select map position, select chopper class: select select select. Unfortunately my review code didn’t grace me with an instruction manual so the term fumbling around in the dark is an apt adage here so to all those who think they can just pick this up and play, be prepared for a good read.
 |
 |
|
| Another bland and barren landscape | We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when! |
Finally, the on-screen prompt direct me to my cockpit. Gleefully I click the button as I’m dying to get airborne and shot some nasty, commy, South Korean gunship out of the skies. After an incredibly long loading time, I’m in. I position my finger over the keyboard, ready myself for battle and...it crashes. I stare in horror as I realise that for all my tweaking in the various options menus leading up to this point was I at no point asked if I would like to save my settings. Ah! There must have been an auto-save implemented so I wouldn’t have to go through all that again, I thought. I thought wrong.
Instead of just copying and pasting the last two paragraphs I’ll just tell you that the process was identical, although given the myriad of different options on offer and no real way of telling way difference any of them might make I couldn’t be 100% certain that I’d made the same choices. Still, back to the cockpit. This time I wasn’t so lucky, it actually let me fly the damn thing, for a while.
After nosing into the ground and exploding on the first few tries I finally managed to get some air between me and the terra firma. Flying was a slow, ‘choppy’ (couldn’t resist!) experience and with the draw distance being about 100 meters in front of me there wasn’t really anything to keep me entertained as I crawled toward my target.
As soon as combat arrived things picked up somewhat. The AI flanked me with cunning and shot at me with purpose. The only thing that marred my escape was the frame-rate. The stop-start feeling of the controls really took the edge and thrill off dodging and weaving to try to stay on target. Then something odd happened: I was flying low to try and surprise my enemy with a blind-sided attack when I crashed. I gazed puzzled at the screen as to why as I previously saw no obstacle. Then suddenly as I watched the flames engulf my chopper, the camera panned it was made apparent that I’d hit a building, although it hadn’t been drawn-in at the time of collision so I had know way of knowing that it was there. Nice.
The list of faults unfortunately doesn’t end there. The aforementioned collision detection anomaly in cities – it happened more than once I can tell you – isn’t the only thing that Enemy Engaged 2 fails to let you in on. For example, there are missing airbases, on occasion the AI aircraft become very confused, disappearing shadows, invisible infantry: the list goes on. In fact, you won’t be playing EE2 for very long until you’ll notice something’s amiss.
 |
 |
|
| The Black Hawk swoops! | Ready for take off |
If you are a fan of flight sims and like many others enjoyed EECH, I’m sure there’s something in this for you. The missions are plentiful and varied as all the campaigns are unscripted, so you’ll never play the same game twice and the various tweaks you can make to your craft will suit bird-watchers out there who relish the prospect at a realistic sim such as this tries to be. Just prepare to be very forgiving of the show stopping bugs and flaws that the game contains. Maybe the die-hard modding community can do something with this as they had done wonders with EECH, but relying on your fan-base to iron out bugs and to fill the multiplayer slots just to make a game enjoyable isn’t really the best premise for creating a game.
Top Game Moment:
TOP GAME MOMENT
Playing the game for 5 minutes without noticing any bugs.
