Take on Helicopters is a simulator set inside one of the most melodramatic, bizarre soap-opera campaigns ever created. I just don’t understand Bohemia, they create these meticulous worlds and simulations of audaciously complicated machinery and at the same time they try to weave equally ambitious narratives through them like they’re fucking Francis For Coppola. Unfortunately for them (and us) Bohemia clearly don’t have the skill to be able to pull this off, their engine can’t seem to handle cutscenes well and their NPC ‘performances’ can’t even reach the dizzy Half Life 1 heights of having characters actually look at the player during a conversation. Voice acting here is super weird too, the accents sound so flat and neutral – clearly the work of amateur actors concentrating so much on maintaing an accent they are not native to that they don’t have any energy left to actually act.

The end result is a budget soap opera being told through the very wooden Arma 2 engine, at times it’s actually surreal – a twisted view of reality a bit like Jacobs Ladder. You know what though? It’s glorious. Bohemia have given context to an aviation sim, I believe this is the first game to do this – the campaign is a tale of two brothers who own a private heliport, it’s about their struggle to maintain financial momentum in a difficult economic period. One of the brothers is a war veteran who was recently injured and lost his ability to fly helicopters leaving all of that up to the player character. The missions are mostly simple courier jobs but there are some surprises in there too like Whale hunting and some really, really weird war time flashback missions. It’s all completely bonkers but it remains oddly compelling and does a good job of easing the player into the game. The campaign starts very simply and integrates the tutorial missions directly into it. Also in fairness to the story, it’s not a tale about becoming the best – there’s not a thread of egotism or player empowerment and domination to be found, it’s just a story about making the best of a bad situation and it’s almost humbling as we rarely get videogame narratives with these ambitions. It’s just a shame that they couldn’t pull it off.

It’s all about the flying though and this is where the game gets it right; my only other helicopter sim experience is with FSX and Arma 2 – I would say the choppers here feel very similar to that of Arma 2, though the physics feel a lot deeper, forces like turbulence, lift and rotation are a lot stronger making the choppers quicker to stall. Arma’s ‘auto hover’ function is present here also which stabalises the craft and locks out pitch and yaw, this is useful for landing in tight spots but it also feels a bit like cheating. Helicopters are difficult fuckers to land though so I was glad this function exists.

One of the first things I assume anyone would do when playing this game for the first time is to try and land a chopper atop one of the many skycrapers in the metticulous recreation of Seattle. It’s one of the biggest thrills that the game offers; interacting with the massive area they’ve modelled is key to what makes this aviation sim different to others. The world is extreamly detailed and you’re often tasked with landing on pin-point surfaces which seems impossible from a height but once you land and jump out of the chopper to take a look round it all makes sense. Being able to run arround and view the aircraft from a man-perspective brings more context to the mechanical beasts than you would find in other flight sims. Also the fact that Bohemia have strictly modelled just Seattle means that the low-level detail is high. Graphically though the game is a mixed bag, performance is pretty poor all-round much in the same way that Arma 2 is, in some spots I was getting as low a 20fps on low detail settings with my new(ish) GTX570 powered PC, which seems ridiculous.

I get the feeling that this is a helicopter sim for Arma fans – if you’re familiar with Arma then you will know how to interact with the world using the context sensitive mouse wheel to enter vehicles or talk to people, you’d also be accustomed to the shameful voice acting and NPC animations. If you’re new to Bohemia games I think you’d be in for a bit of a shock, I can turn a blind eye to the dodgy production issues because I know that Bohemia games offer experiences no other games can but it takes a lot to get there.

I love it but I can’t score it high – I want to applaud Bohemia for trying to weave an interesting narrative into a simulation but it can’t be rewarded because as they have demonstrated with every single other game they’ve made, they just can’t do it. They fuck it up spectacularly every single time. Also the performance issues and mind melting interface (try going through the hundreds of controls to map a new joystick) really let this game down. It’s a brilliant game let down because of the studio over-reaching in areas that they’ve always struggled with. I’d say because of its pure focus on helicopters that this game isn’t as fundamentally flawed as Arma 2, but at the same time it’s not as fundamentally brilliant.

[6]