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Game: Comanche 4
Publisher: Novalogic
Minimum system requirements: Win98/ME/2000/XP, DirectX 8, Pentium II 450, AGP graphics accelerator (directX compatible, 16 MB), 128 MB RAM, 250 Mb Hard disk space, 4x speed cdrom.
Best Prices: Comanche 4 (PC)
Demo Download:
  The first time I saw the original Comanche my jaw was on the floor. These were the glory days of the flight simulators. Microprose was one of the biggest names in the game and spectrum holobyte’s little sim called Falcon 3.0 ruled the skies. I saw the rolling hills gliding by for the first time on a friend’s computer. He told me the game needed a whopping 4 MB of ram. I only had 2 MB. That same weekend, I upgraded to 4 MB just to be able to play this game. Let me tell you, not many games make me upgrade that fast.
Comanche was a big hit for the relatively new Novalogic. It boosted their proprietary technology called Voxelspace to make the game a reality. It was somewhat blocky, but compared to the king of those days, Falcon 3.0 with its plain polygons, it was a major improvement. Novalogic was sitting on a goldmine, or so they thought. Because some years later, an innovation was made that would revolutionize the Gaming biz. It was a little thing called 3D acceleration, the first nail in the voxel coffin. These 3D chips turned the plain poly’s into textured and shaded joys to our visual perception, rapidly closing the gap between voxels and poly’s as far as eye candy is concerned. I’ll give Novalogic one thing though, they are persistent! Even when every single game supported a wide variety of 3D accelerators, they were still making Voxel games, right up until Delta Force 2.
But in the end, even Novalogic ditched the Voxels and went for the beautiful poly’s we’ve all come to love. And when you take one look at Comanche 4, you will be glad they did.
First of, let me tell you, I’m a rotorhead! I love the realism of a good flight sim. I’ve clocked more hours on Falcon 4.0 than Half-life, Quake and Unreal put together. Therefore I was somewhat skeptical of the design goal for Comanche 4, which was to appeal to both the action gamer and the dedicated simmer. It seems to be the Holy Grail for sims these days, now that the hardcore sim has finally died (yes, I’m weeping inside right now).
GAMEPLAY:
First off, to my sim buddies out there, this is NOT a helicopter simulation! Hold up, don’t run away.. There is more. The flight model is quite simple. It flies like a housefly. It turns and twists into odd angles that defy all known laws of physics with the greatest of ease. At first I downright hated it. I just stepped out of Longbow 2 and hopped into my Comanche. Calling the flight model realistic is like saying 3rd grade math is rocket science. But, the funny thing is, I did enjoy swooping around in it! You see, this game flies so easily, you feel like a crack helicopter pilot. After some flying, you don’t say to yourself: “this is impossible”, you say: “damn, I’m good at this!” really, it’s amazing. Two thumbs up to Novalogic for accomplishing this. Just to bad they call it realism.
The game has no fancy dynamic campaign or intricate ground war; it has over 30 pre-scripted missions in different locations. The missions themselves are somewhat short and lack any real surprises. They are fun though, just not special. They usually involve shooting an X amount of targets. And if you miss one foot soldier somewhere, you’ll have to go back and hunt that little sucker down before the mission is declared a success. I guess that one solder plays a pivot role in the ongoing conflict, yeah right! After the last target is annihilated, a message pops onto the screen informing you of a job well done. From that point on, all control is taken away from you as you watch your chopper fly away in a cinematic outside view. Hello?! Isn’t getting back half the mission? Not to mention the landing. I guess Novalogic doesn’t want us to get into that.
The enemy AI is pretty straight forward, they mostly move along a scripted path until they decide to engage, from there they just charge straight at you, guns blazing, until they are dead. All these things remind me of the fact that deep down, this is an action blast-fest wanting to be more. The Comanche could as well be a spaceship for all I care, it certainly moves like one. This game really forces me to step off my sim horse and ride a different steed. If I had to judge this game as a sim, I would have destroyed it. But slowly I came to realize that what we have here is an action game, featuring a helicopter. Once I did that, the game started to become fun. Zooming through the landscape blasting targets left and right is actually quite enjoyable. Yes, the avionics are a joke… who cares, lets blow stuff up!
Controlling my spaceship-Comanche was a real struggle at first. I tried to control it like I’m used to flying helicopters in, let’s say, Longbow 2. I used my thrustmaster FLCS and TQS combo, coupled with a pair of rudder pedals. After I while I got the hang of it and I felt like the master of rotary flight. Controlling the chopper using the mouse and the keyboard is just too big a stretch for me. I can’t do it. That’s not to say you can’t. But for me, flying a chopper like that is just too damn unnatural.
GamePlay: 4 out of 5
GRAPHICS:
Now, this is where the game really starts to float my boat. This game looks AWESOME! Do you need a game to make that kid next door jealous, you know, the guy with the X-BoX running Halo. Well, buy this game (and a GeForce3!). It just looks that great. Dust kicks up when you get near the ground, circles appear when you hover over water and trees bend over from the downdraft. The detail is so high, you can see the grass! You can see soldiers faces if you can get close enough. It’s like flying through Delta Force 3 on steroids. The landscape is very sharp and beautifully rendered. Ditching the voxels was probably the best thing Novalogic did in the last five years! One warning though, I’m running this sucker on a 1.4 Ghz T-Bird with a GeForce 3 and 512MB RAM. On my system, it runs silky smooth. On lower end systems your mileage may vary (drastically). The one thing I didn’t like about the graphics is, again, realism related. Even in all its beauty, it looks a bit cartoonish. The bright colors of the water and the grass make it look a little bit too much like a computer game. And the objects and soldiers look a little big. I’ve flown in airplanes really low through the mountains of southern California and you can see nowhere near the detail you can see in Comanche 4. In this game, you can practically see the grin on the face of a soldier right before he shoots a stinger up your tailpipe. Fun? Yes! Realistic? Hell no!
Graphics: 4.5 out of 5
AUDIO:
Well, nothing to brag about really. The menu music is your usual run-of-the-mill menu tune. The in-game sounds are adequate. I couldn’t hear my rotor at all though, even when I cranked the engine sound way up. Is it a bug? You can, however, hear all kinds of sounds from the battlefield that are a little hard to believe. When you’re flying over a jeep at 100 ft and 130 kts. You cannot hear its engine! So why can I hear it in Comanche 4? “Well, because it’s exciting and fun” the novalogic sales-person tells us. And in a way, he’s right.
Audio: 3 out of 5
CONCLUSION:
I dare to say that despite it’s obvious departure from the known laws of physics, Comanche 4 is a fun game! And coming from a hardcore simmer like myself, that is quite an accomplishment. But it isn’t all roses and candy. Some nasty bugs hinder the game in a most serious way. I had my computer lock up on several occasions at the start of a mission. The rotor sound seems non-existent and sometimes textures disappear ever so shortly, only to reappear again. These bugs need to be fixed pronto. But I’m sure Novalogic will come through for us, like they did on every other game they made.
This game is for action lovers who want something a little different and simmers who are looking elsewhere for a fix. I sure had fun playing it, despite its ills. Maybe it’s the slim pickings on the sim market these days that have derailed my pure simmer soul. I’m sure some of my sim buddies would support such a statement. But he who is not in motion is destined for extinction. I’d like to say to the hardcore crowd, come out and play! In the end, I’ll guarantee you’ll have some fun.
Overall: 4 out of 5
SCREENSHOTS:
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