Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!
Extra Note: We've entered Shelftember! In this much-vaunted month, we will be processing one of the second round entries every day. I'll be spending one hour apiece with each game - inspired by DanielKempster's backlog-clearing series "An Hour With..." - and determining its fate from there.
This was one of those many unplayed games in my collection I thought might be worth a spin, as I'm really not familiar with the flight simulator genre and especially not those produced specifically for consoles. Dropship: United Peace Force is set in the near-future of 2050 CE, which gives the game plenty of opportunities to show off some future tech and make the flight and combat that much easier to swallow. It figures you'd simplify the military if the technology was there. It was developed by Team Soho: a small UK studio that also produced the Getaway games and was later folded into Sony Studios London to produce gimmicky AR and VR games like SingStar, Wonderbook and The Playroom. I guess they're pretty much the Sony equivalent to Rare, another British studio which switched from interesting games to glorified tech demos. But hey, this game is all about playing around with future toys, so I suppose it's kismet.
While Dropship can be a little dry, it's surprisingly accessible: I spent the Shelftember-mandated hour of play time powering through the five training missions and a couple of the campaign missions, and there's quite a variance in what you're required to accomplish. In the titular dropship, your missions tend to involve collecting and depositing vehicles as quickly as possible. On other occasions you're destroying air and ground targets in fighters, or driving around in an APC. There's also some AI commanding going on, as you can pick out targets for allied units to attack or defend, depending on the context. Despite the amount of take-offs and maneuvering you're doing, the game finds a way to make it all intuitive: both shoulder buttons take off and both triggers descend, hitting L1 and L2 moves you left in hover mode (and likewise the R1 and R2 for hovering right) or adjusts the yaw while in flight mode (the dropships all operate like VTOL Harriers, it seems), and the left analog moves you around. It took a little while to adjust for the sluggish acceleration and deceleration - when you're moving at speeds up to 1800mp/h there's significant inertia - but the gameplay principles are solid and approachable.
The United Peace Force of the title is like a militarized UN, one that regularly keeps an eye on terrorist organisations across the world. In the backdrop to discussing the United Peace Force's role in monitoring the Middle East for terrorist activity, there's some ominous newsreel talk about a populist party taking control of large parts of China, and I very much suspect that the latter half of the game if not the majority will be spent on deterring this high-tech rebel Chinese division. It always nearly comes down to the Chinese or Russians, after all. It reminds me of the A.S.P. Air Strike Patrol (a.k.a. Desert Fighter) game for SNES: there was definitely something happening beneath the surface of foiling yet another tin-pot dictator in that game's story.
Dropship's a fine game but, if I'm being honest, there's not a whole lot here that's captivating me. I figure if I wanted to go full dogfights and mayhem I'd opt for something more arcade-y like the Ace Combat series or finally try out Elite: Dangerous. Dropship has the versatility and mission variance on its side, as well as great production values (well, for a 2002 PS2 game at least), but it's a bit too austere and simulation-heavy to keep my ADD-addled attention for long. It is, in so many words and in no pejorative terms, a Drew Scanlon game. I guess I was just hoping with a subtitle like "UPF" that there'd be a bit more chaos and frivolity involved...
Result: Eliminated.
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