I believe I can fly
So, as I mentioned, briefly, above the premise of this game is that you are the commander/pilot of a Search & Rescue helicopter and it’s your job to make sure that Joe Public can rely on a friendly hand from the skies to extract him from whatever poo he’s managed to get himself up to his neck in. There are three helos to choose from and while they’re all jolly nice, as far as I can tell there’s no real reason to choose one over the others, as they will all do the job - it’s just a matter of personal preference – whether you’d like a great lumbering bird, a nifty yellow number, or something red and sporty(ish). The helos available are the HH-65A Dauphin (Dolphin for the US market), the Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King, or the BK-117 C-1 (said little yellow number). I tend to like the BK-117 myself as it has an excellent field of view and it has skids instead of wheels, unlike the other two, which makes landing on ships and other places short of space a hell of a lot easier as you come to an immediate halt instead of touching down and then diving for the brake key to stop yourself rolling forward into the bulkhead, trees, by-standers, or whatever. Running into solid things can be a real career-stopper if you’re in a helicopter so to my mind this is a definite advantage.
The graphics are, well, pretty damned good actually. It all looks very nice and most of the transparency problems from SAR 3 have gone, although it seems there is still a problem with clouds being in front of objects that they should really be behind – office blocks for example, such as when delivering victims to hospital in the training missions and the clouds are in front of the hospital building – possible, I suppose, but incredibly unlikely. The Lego man, I am pleased to say, has gone, and been replaced by Michael Schumacher which is nice because I was wondering what he was doing with himself these days (with Bruce Dickinson now a license-holding commercial pilot I’m not surprised by much any more). The graphics assessment is based on 32 bit colour (not that I generally notice that much difference) and I must say that on the whole the textures and colours are very pleasing although it is noticeable that they go from being pretty blah generic landscape textures to being crisp, almost photo-realistic textures all of a sudden when you get near to them – really, quite near to them it has to be said - it might have been nicer if these higher res textures faded in as you get closer but, again, it’s not a show-stopper and it would probably have buggered up the scrolling for people with lower spec machines. The cockpit graphics are better than on SAR3 and a lot better than SAR2. It is entirely feasible now to use the cockpit to do everything you need to do while flying from A to B, as all of the instruments work pretty effectively, although when sitting at the set distance from the pilot’s seat to the control panel you could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve forgotten your contact lenses as the writing on the gauges is unreadable (there is an option to move your point of view closer to the instruments at which point the writing becomes legible).
The building graphics are OK, if somewhat blocky, and they seem to re-use the same decorative features again and again – I was puzzling over why anyone would want to put a yellow shamrock on a stick and then scatter them all over the place before I worked out that these are supposed to be street lights … well, maybe where they live, I suppose. I do, however, like the amount of detail included on the helicopters, down to tiny things like the markings on escape hatches - I figure that most of the people who are likely to play this game are also the kind of people who look up when a helicopter goes over, so this type of thing will probably go down well. As with most current games, the trees have been designed using the textured cross method which I guess suffices but isn’t particularly spectacular. In my case I’m usually just panicking about the close proximity of the trees to the place I want to land and don’t really notice how they’ve put the damn things together. In some of the media surrounding this game I have heard some boasting about the sea and other water effects, which I think may be a little overstated – CFS 2 had sea that washed up and down on the shore, as did Operation Flashpoint but for all the hype SAR4 only has water that goes up and down a bit (sometimes), and flows (again sometimes) but most of the time just sits there looking like blue, white-specked lino.
