Team Apache was originally the brainchild of Bryan Walker, an ex-Apache pilot turned sim designer. Bryan had expressed an interest in creating a game that captured the human side of helicopter warfare. This "human aspect" sets the tone throughout the game. Because of this, hard-core sim grognards are very likely to be disappointed if they buy the game expecting to be on familiar ground. Team Apache is a very different kind of ballgame.

The single most striking part of this approach is that managing your team is a kind of simulation in itself - in fact, it's a whole lot like the role-playing "simulations" that are popular with Japanese console gamers. Each member has a series of aptitudes and weaknesses. The challenge is to pair pilots and gunners with complimentary skills and personalities, use them to their maximum potential, make sure that you can get them enough sack time, deal with the occasional crisis, and still be able to field enough able men and machines to accomplish your mission and hopefully win the war.

Unlike role-playing games, though - there are no sheets of statistics to tell you what each man is capable of or how they're feeling. You must infer that from their personal file, how they respond to you, and how well they perform in battle. Balancing all these needs is tricky but offers a unique attitude towards combat simulations.

If a workstation falls, does it make a sound?

One spot where Team Apache shines without question is in the graphics department. While the standard non-accelerated graphics are rather unimpressive (Longbow 2 has a much nicer software rendering mode) it's the 3D accelerated version that really brings the house down.

It would be difficult to find just the right superlatives to use to properly describe the graphics engine used in Team Apache. So, foregoing the usual phrases and descriptions, the best term to describe the game engine is simply "workstation-class". Mindscape/Simis have reached a new plateau with their graphics engine, and frankly if you have a reasonably fast PC (say 200 MHz or higher and a very fast 3D card) you will be treated to the kind of graphics that would shame some professional simulators and Silicon Graphics computer workstations.

Old time sim fans may remember catching a glimpse of the exquisite military-grade simulators on TV once every so often - only to be frustrated over their inability to toy with such dream machines. Team Apache's highly polished graphics engine can actually fulfill those dreams. Very smooth frame rates, good texturing, and excellent attention to detail all mark the TA graphics engine.

Some aspects of that detail merit special attention. For example, when you hover just above the ground, rings of "dust" are blown across the ground. From an external view, when the cockpit isn't reflecting light back at you, you can see the Apache crew inside looking around for targets. The rotors, chain gun, and optics suite are all nicely animated.

There is a scattering of individual trees that you need to avoid, although they are more for show than for tactics. Entire downtown cities are modeled where you can play chicken between the skyscrapers, stalk down city streets, or land on the roof of a building and take a breather. (Fortunately, the collision detection is accurate enough that you can fly right in between buildings, lampposts, houses, and trees - as long as you don't actually hit anything)

The rocket motor glow in the back of a FFAR, Hellfire, or Stinger is a nice touch. Enemy tracer fire glows brightly, streams well, and looks positively dangerous. The infrared sights are also very impressive - not only do you get the "image halo" as in Longbow 2, but you get a very believable "washout" when an explosion blinds your sights temporarily. The effect is very similar to looking a little too close to a camera flash. One notable problem with the view system is that parts of helicopters disappear as they fly into the distance - frequently the entire helicopter disappears except for the rotors, making it difficult to keep an eye out for allied and unspotted enemy helos.

Does this mean the graphics are superior to Longbow 2? Yes and no. It's really apples and oranges. Team Apache boasts a much smoother framerate, has some nicer special effects, very impressive urban areas, and has that "workstation" look to it, but Longbow 2 has better 3D models of the Apache, much better terrain texturing, and certainly more interesting terrain (at least in Azerbaijan). The terrain in Team Apache is little more than a series of green rolling hills - regardless of whether you're going through Columbia or Latvia, the terrain feels almost the same.

Views and sighting

The options for views are about half-and-half. Really the most useful view is the "no-cockpit" view. This view can be panned around easily, gives the best field of view, and has the important instruments. The bitmapped cockpit has the advantage of adding the more instruments in your field of view, but it suffers for not supporting side or oblique views at all - a very curious omission.

The virtual cockpit tries to combine the benefits of both of the other cockpits and nearly succeeds, but it has two other problems that hold it back. First, it has an unnerving tendency to stretch and twist under manuevers as if your gunship was made of taffy. The effect is fairly subtle, but it's just enough to be distracting.

Second, the reflections off of the canopy windscreen make an admirable attempt to create a more realistic cockpit, but in practice, it tends to give the windscreen a frosted look that is sometimes annoying. Also a factor in the slewable views it that there is no padlock option, and no way to turn your head more than 90 degrees in either direction. Having been in the seat of an Apache before, I would argue that the pilot should have a little more rearward visibility (at least 120 degrees either way) although this is admittedly a relatively minor point.

One of the concepts originally conceived for Flying Nightmares 2 obviously made it into Team Apache, and that is simulated sighting. In most helo sims, once you establish a line-of-sight with a target, it immediately pops up on all your avionics and targeting equipment, ripe for the plucking. This doesn't happen in Team Apache. Most likely in fact, you'll see absolutely nothing more than the terrain.

Back at the 1997 E3 expo, Bryan explained the sighting system to us. The way that it works is that whether or not you can spot something depends on a variety of factors: Are you looking in the right direction, how long are you looking at the same area, what size is the quarry, what terrain is it hiding in, is it firing, moving, or laying still?. The result is that - just like real life - if you zoom at 200' over the jungle at 130 knots, you might fly over an entire company and never see a thing. Fly at 10' over the jungle canopy at 15 knots and you'll be extremely vulnerable to attack, but you'll spot just about anything moving within 400 meters.

Side note: Hunting for ground troops in Vietnam, a tactic evolved that combined a "white" scout element (that flew low and slow looking for targets) with a "red" gunship element (that would stay high up and keep sight of the scout). This evolved into what became known as the hunter/killer "pink" team. The logic behind such a tactic becomes very clear after putting in some hours in Team Apache. The corollary is that the new sighting methods (combined with a little creativity to create a better jungle) could very easily be made into a remarkable Vietnam-era helo sim.

I experienced a particularly stunning example of how this really works in an earlier mission. This mission.called to provide close air support to wipe out enemy positions laying siege to a town. Upon arriving, I saw the battle already heavily in progress - tracers flying back and forth and the occasional mortar shell detonating. Spotting a few jeeps and AAA emplacements, I nailed them all from a safe range with Hellfires, then flew in close to mop up. An enemy soldier started popping off rounds from the outskirts of town, so I "stomped on the brakes" and turned around to take care of him.

However, in all the reckless flying, I failed to spot a large group of soldiers who were quietly lying in wait nearby. Just a moment after I stopped, the whole field I halted in erupted in small-arms tracer fire, and my Apache was taking hits from all sides. After only a few seconds of being used for target practice, I had no choice but to limp back to base with one really beat up helicopter. In conventional gunship games, such a trap could never be sprung - you'd see the enemy long before they had the chance to do any damage. However, with Team Apache, taking the "Rambo" attitude can get you up to your neck in trouble before you realize it.

The spotting system still has a couple flaws that need to be worked out. While how well you can spot targets will depend on the vagaries of the skills and well-being of your gunner, you can end up in unfortunate situations where even legally blind gunners should be able to spot targets but can't. In target rich environments, sometimes the gunner will rapidly switch between targets and/or ignore targeting orders. In another case, an enemy Hind spent nearly a minute lobbing one missile after another before the gunner spotted him - making it a little too hard to keep on top of things sometimes. It is worth adding that you do have the option to enable a "cheater radar" display that will show you where enemy units are, although actually getting a fix on them still is done with the given spotting system.

Aiming is also very unique. With most games, the moment you select a target, your weapons are instantly trained and ready like a science-fiction laser. Aiming in Team Apache is much more human and believable. When using the chain gun, once a target is spotted, the gunner will turn his head to aim at the target, and the gunsight cue will indicate the gun tracking around until it lines up with the target. The actual aim point will dance around as the gunner constantly adjusts his aim, so there is a certain degree of timing and manuevering involved to get the most accurate shot possible.

Missiles use a somewhat similar method. Once Hellfires are selected and a promising target is found, a few seconds of stable flight are necessary to get an accurate enough fix for the gunner to activate the laser. Holding an accurate lock will still depend on how smoothly you fly and the condition of your gunner. Stinger shots are of course fire-and-forget, but they still require a moment for the seeker head to get a fix. Rockets are - surprisingly enough - employed just like they are in conventional helicopter sims, but be warned that actually hitting and destroying targets with them is a real challenge.

Don't bother to adjust your sound card

Sounds are nicely oriented but have a few quirks. On one hand, the basic sounds are well done and stereo panning is nicely implemented. This way, you can quickly localize where gunfire is coming from and actually use your stereo or headphones like another set of sensors. On the other hand, incorrect sounds, sound popping, and some of the worst voice acting this side of a Godzilla movie tend to offset the positive aspects.

With regards to incorrect sounds, the two worst offenders are the rotor and ground fire sounds. The Apache uses a four-bladed rotor that generates a kind of buzzing sound (similar to an eggbeater in a bowl of batter). It's much more subtle sound than the one that Team Apache uses - the obnoxious "whup-whup-whup" sound that is so specific to the two-bladed rotors of the Vietnam-era Huey helicopters - an inaccuracy that really kills suspension of disbelief for experienced sim players. Ground fire uses a heavy machine gun sound for all ground fire, regardless of whether the source is small-arms fire or a 23mm AAA cannon.

Popping and crackling is all over the sound effects in the game, particularly the voices. The options menu warns that playing the game at 800x600 resolution can cause such problems unless you are using a high-performance video card, but even with a Pure3D2 on board, the distortion was prevalent at all resolutions. We have heard from Neil Soane (Associate Producer for Team Apache) that a patch is in the works to correct this and hopefully will be ready by the end of the month.

Ed. Note: This in from QSound Tech: Team Apache uses QSound QMixer 3D audio mixing technology. It has come to our attention that there is a very minor problem that affects the performance of the sound system throughout. Team Apache normally stores the qmixer.dll file in the \Windows\System directory. Create a text file called qmixer.ini in the same directory containing only the following two lines:
(Defaults)
SamplesPerSec = 22

(Does a voice like Jackie Gleason really fit this guy?)

The crew voices themselves range from pretty decent to downright horrible depending on which crewmembers go flying on the mission. Not only does the game do some terrible matching between the voices and the crew photos, but over half the guys on your team have either nasal voices, bad accent stereotypes, lousy voice acting, or all of the above - and then there's Elvis. Furthermore, much of the writing for their dialogue is more appropriate for a "B" movie than it is for the elite of Army aviation.

The world's most user-friendly Apache

Avionics will quickly strike most sim players as being rather odd. Team Apache seems to really gloss over avionics - just giving it the "Hollywood" nod. The basics are all there, but outside of your basic display, the other instruments are in unwieldy views and (with the exception of the RWR and caution lights) aren't particularly useful. Even the "heads down" view is totally impractical to use in any mode other than software rendering because there is a long lag between the time that you request it and when it pops up.

This is strong encouragement to stick with the IHADSS display. There aren't any special features for targeting, turning on and off the laser, turning on and off the jammer, or so on. 90% of the targeting is handled totally automatically by your gunner. All you have to do is fly into weapons constraints, give him time to line up the shot, then pull the trigger.

The Hollywood influence is quite substantial. When a SAM launcher is tracking or launching a missile, a cyberpunk version of "Bitching Betty" gives you a rather cheesy warning. Missiles seem to track you just fine regardless of how low you fly, but punch out a single chaff or flare, and the missile will suddenly zing off in some other random direction for a couple seconds until the effect wears off.

Enemy helicopters have almost no AI to speak of - they just sit and wait for you to show up, where they'll engage you with their AA weapons until shot down. They're little more than obstacles to knock down on your way to the primary target. In fact, most enemy units are conveniently placed in your path, so that if you fly much off the prescribed route, you can evade most of the opposition. Also strange is that the Stinger AA missiles are rendered on the Apache as Sidewinders, and like Sidewinders, you can only carry two, instead of the proper four.

A tour de forces

The physics and flight model are pretty good in general. While the flight model feels very authentic overall, there are a few subtleties about it that are just a bit awkward. For example, it is possible to hover so absolutely perfectly that it seems like your helicopter is sitting on a rock rather than hanging from a quartet of violently spinning wings or bobbing on a cushion of air.

The first version of Janes Longbow flight model had the reputation of making the helicopter want to climb like crazy when trying to stop. TA seems to go to the opposite extreme. It's extremely difficult to whip it into a steep climb using the cyclic (joystick). Regardless of how fast you're going, pulling back hard results in only a moderate climb and fast deceleration.

Likewise, your altitude control is completely at the whim of the throttle - you'll go shooting up or down extremely fast based on it's setting. There are a few other oddities that are more difficult to describe accurately. However, once you get used to those quirks, the other 90% of the flight model is very well done. Not only does it represent rotor torque, inertia, and other flight aspects well, but it's also remarkably accessible for less-experienced sim pilots.

Team Apache does a very admirable job of implementing force feedback. Few things are more ridiculous than when a company claims that making the stick buzz when you pull the trigger is force feedback. Hardly. True force feedback is when the kinds of force and resistance one encounters actually gives useful information about what the craft is doing. Team Apache does this very well. For starters, the feedback simulates the "blast effect" when large nearby explosions smack into your helo and toss it around. The expected kick from firing weapons and being hit is also there.

However, the real feedback is where the stick simulates the "load" on the rotors. At low speed/low collective, you can mush the stick around fairly easily without much response. Once you take off, though - you can feel the resistance on the stick as you make manuevers that alternatively load and unload the rotor disc. It gives a greater feel for what the flight model is doing beyond the limits of graphic displays and sound effects. You can even feel twitching in the controls as you push the limits of the Apache's speed envelope. Nicely done!

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
Gameplay : 75
Graphics : 95
Sound : 65
Intelligence/AI : 55
User Interface/Mission Planner : 65
Fun Factor : 85
Learning Curve : 3 hours
Overall Rating : 75

(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)