This is your Captain Speaking
The missions are pretty varied in themselves but ultimately revolve around trying to land somewhere tricky, hoisting something from or to somewhere tricky or a combination of the two. A typical mission would see you flying to a location, coming to a hover (with the aid of the Hover Augmentation preferably), hoisting something/someone up or down, flying to a hospital, and then returning to base. Along the way you need to follow all the rules or be penalised by losing points on your final mission score. Mostly the missions work very well although there are a few really irritating incidents where the mission triggers are missing or just don’t work very well. For example on one of the training missions (the most difficult one in my opinion) you have to pick an unconscious victim up from the ground using a medic in a sling. This mission is made tricky by the fact that the place that you have to winch the victim from is in the middle of a stand of trees, now this wouldn’t normally be a major problem except the trees appear to be about 60’ high and your maximum augmented Hover altitude is 50’ so you have to manoeuvre yourself down into the copse without twatting the rotor on the surrounding trees and all while trying to pick up a chap by dropping your medic exactly on him. The problem that I encountered with this mission is that the first time I dropped the medic down to the victim, despite the fact that my medic was actually standing on the victim’s face, he wouldn’t pick the victim up. In the end I found that I had to winch the medic up into the helicopter again and then lower him down a second time at which point he picked the victim up with no problems. To be frank on this particular mission I just could have done without it. I was already screaming at the computer as it was. This is the mission that made me reconsider having my pilot set to ‘mortal’. There are very few things more frustrating that completing five successive missions and then having to start over on the sixth. Most of the missions are quite long and involved and speaking as someone who has played the same two missions over and over on the demo while trying to find someone to ship it to me from the States for less than $80 I don’t have much of a sense of humour left about this sort of thing.
There is a decent variety of weather conditions and times of day that a mission
can be played to keep things interesting. If you are unlucky enough to get a
combination of night time and storm conditions then you’d better reach
for the valium as you are going to need a lot of patience, and to resign yourself
to doing the mission a fair number of times. The missions can be pretty gruelling
even with perfect weather conditions as the ‘copters turn from docile
pets into Tasmanian Devils when you go from forward flight to hovering/landing
with even tiny inputs having a pretty severe effect which can be a problem considering
that most of the landing sites are quite tight. I have yet to make a landing
that doesn’t cause the helicopter to make a noise like it had just been
hit with a sledgehammer when I touched down.
