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Review: Extreme Assault: Part 1© Dan Finkelstein
Aug 5, 1997
There seems to be a lot of helicopter simulations coming along these days. Unfortunately, most of them appeal to die-hard helicopter fanatics, and simulate every aspect of flying one of these monsters. However, those are not my kind of games.
Sorry, but memorizing what each key on the keyboard does is not my idea of fun. No, if I'm going to play a helicopter simulation, I want one that requires aiming and shooting, and that's it.
While BlueBytes' latest game, Extreme Assault tries to do just this (and succeeds in some aspects), there are several major problems I have with this game that prohibit me from giving it a positive review.
First and foremost, this game lacked one feature that I find essential in every game I buy -- gamma correction. Everyone out there who has an old or lower-quality monitor knows what I'm talking about. Over the years, my 14" CTX monitor has gotten darker and adjusting the brightness knob does not help -- it's at the highest setting. The only way around this is to use the gamma correction feature of many popular games -- that, or play the game in the dark, which I found myself doing for Extreme Assault. This one, easy to implement feature would have most likely boosted up my opinion of this game. And to add to that, most missions in Extreme Assault take place at night -- this results in a blur of dark textures and the red flames of fire which make the game very hard to play.
Secondly, controlling your helicopter is also challenging. Instead of going with most helicopter games (as well as helicopters in real life), where pushing forward on your joystick makes you go forward, and pulling back, the designers of this game instead opted to use the "A" and "Z" keys to go forward and back, and the joystick to move left+right, as well as raise and lower your altitude. Adding to this control fiasco is their choice of having the up/down controls inverted, so that pushing down on the sick raises the nose of the chopper, while pulling up makes you go down. Yes, it's amazingly confusing, and yes, it's amazingly frustrating.
Next week: Part 2
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