Number one in a field of one
Helicopters are cool. They defy gravity in a unique way and military whirlybirds feature high end technology. They are a fearsome addition to any battlefield.
That's probably why twenty years ago, PC gaming was full of great chopper sims. Janes AH 64-D Longbow, Novalogic's Comanche series and many others. They tested your rig and made full use of that expensive flight stick you bought. Yet somewhere along the line these types of games seemed to have faded away. There is still a market for dry simulators on the PC but you don't see games like this any more, so when one appears on a console it's worth looking at.
You might expect as it is a console game (as well as PC) that some bright-eyed Product Manager demanded that the game had an arcade feel. That it featured power-ups and rapid fire action; that it was easy to play and had a storyline about a rookie pilot and a grizzled veteran who said 'Bitch' quite a lot and scowled in the cut scenes. The enemy would be a US General turned traitor.
Gaijin Entertainments game has none of that which perhaps is not surprising. Don't forget these guys made IL-2 Sturmovik, probably the last great flight sim. For start, the Apache is really tricky to fly well if you fly in Realistic Mode. The easier setting is called Training Mode so it's obvious the makers don't really want you flying with a simplified yaw and roll system that limits your choppers ability to angle the blades for speed and agility. Learning to fly is part of the fun, part of the challenge. The apache is armed with Hellfire missiles for Air to Ground offensive. In addition Stinger Heatseekers or Hydra 70 Rockets complement a 30mm Cannon that is used for taking out infantry and light vehicles. They feel good and are relatively easy to use. The cannon is fired from a gunner view that features a Direct View Optics (DVO) system. This is displayed as a black and white camera feed and can also be switched to display infra-red. It's all very 'future warfare' and is not unlike the AC-130 sections in COD.
The missions are set in some fictional theatres of operation, an african state with a pirate problem, a middle eastern country with an insurgency problem and a south american country with a drug problem, so maybe that pesky Product Manager did get his way in some small part, or maybe Gaijin just can't make up interesting stories. But hey, this game is about realism I guess, and those situations are sadly real in the world today.
As you play you encounter further variants on the Apache and there are some other choppers too. Little Navy remote ones and a Mi-35 Hind (The NATO version of the MI-24). There is a campaign mode set in the three countries, some online missions and an interesting local co-op mode where one of you flies and the other controls the gunner. You can also set up a variety of missions in free flight mode. Graphically the game is more than adequate with pretty volumetric smoke and clouds, good details in the ground and a variety in the environments.
I called this review, 'number one in a field of one' because it is unique (on console at least). There really is nothing else like this available but that is also unfair on Gaijin Entertainment because it is a good game in its own right, and if there were more helicopter sims available on console, it's likely this would still be the best.