Final Glimpse: Get ready to earn your pilot's license . . . under hostile fire
This Spring, budding helicopter pilots and flight simulation fans will get their hands on the U.S. release of Whirlwind Over Vietnam: UH-1, the latest offering from Moscow-based publisher and developer 1C. 1C, of course, developed the now-classic IL-2 Sturmovnik series, which recreated WWII dogfights featuring the Russian prop-driven fighter plane of the same name. Whirlwind, meanwhile, puts the player in the pilot's seat of the famous UH-1 Huey helicopter during the Battle of Ia Drang Valley at the outset of the Vietnam War. It promises to continue the IL-2 tradition of an astonishing level of detail and faithfulness to the physics of flight.
The Ia Drang Valley was the site of the first major battle between the U.S. Army and the People's Army of Vietnam. It's the battle documented in the book We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young, and in the movie of (almost) the same name. The American forces were airlifted into an isolated landing zone in search of a Vietnamese force that had attacked a Special Forces base a few weeks earlier. Due to poor intelligence about the area, the U.S. troops quickly found themselves surrounded, outnumbered, and in a desperate fight for their lives. G5 Software has developed a campaign that focuses on the story of this battle, one that is likely heavily influenced by the Mel Gibson movie, not to mention other movies about the Vietnam war. After all, the devs cite Platoon, Apocalypse Now and other popular movies as part of their “research”.
Whirlwind Over Vietnam offers a single-player only experience that has the player moving troops onto the battlefield while providing fire support with the Huey's rockets, Gatling guns, and M60 machine guns. The missions will also have the player spotting fire for distant artillery and carrying out more direct search and destroy style attacks. In order to accomplish all this, the player will be able to hop between roles as pilot, co-pilot and gunner, each one associated with different tasks and capable of using different weapons. The pilot, for instance, is responsible for not only keeping the Huey in the air, but at the same time must make sure that his gunner and co-pilot can hit their targets. Meanwhile, the gunner sits in the open doorway and uses an M60 to direct fire against ground targets. Although the details of the mechanism aren't clear yet, early reports promise that the sighting system of the M60 will be more realistic than the usual point-on-a-target-and-click interface.
In fact, physics realism seems to be Whirlwind's primary claim to fame. It will feature several sliding scales so that the player can adjust the level of realism and difficulty, but at its most realistic, it takes into account things like aircraft weight and load, ground proximity, and wind effects. It also models the peculiarities of the Huey helicopter, which is apparently a very difficult beast to keep in the air even under the best of conditions. Gunning the engine can overheating, excessive vibration and eventually something called “blade slap” which will result in the bird falling out of the sky like a stone. Hard landings can bend skids or damage the fuselage. Realistic damage modeling actually tracks locational damage, determining what systems are affected and causing the helo to react appropriately. If the game lives up to the devs' claims, the amount of detail in this area will be truly amazing. They do seem to know their aviation physics.
But then there are the graphics. From the movies and screenshots released so far, it can't be said that the same level of detail has been applied uniformly to the visuals in Whirlwind. On the one hand, the Huey model looks top-notch. It's accurate down to the nuts and bolts inside the cockpit and out. The pilot has at his or her virtual fingertips every control that is actually present in a real Huey, and every gauge and dial functions as in reality. The panoramic views of the landscape don't look bad in flight, but from close up, the ground, buildings and character models look like a flashback to a budget title from ten years ago. To be fair, the trees and grass are modeled in such a way that when the helicopters pass close over them, they move under the rotor wash. But the ground textures are simply plain and flat. Likewise with the buildings and vehicles: they're plain and blocky and really aren't up to today's standards. This is a flight simulator, of course, and most of the player's time won't be spent up close and personal with the stuff on the ground, but it doesn't bode well for the cinematic experience and engine-generated cutscenes that the game promises. Apparently, the minimum system specs—P4, 2.4 GhZ—go more towards keeping all that fancy physics going.
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