Hovercontrol News
Take on Helicopters Review
By
Nov 13, 2011, 11:26

While Take on Helicopter (ToH) is far from the first helicopter based game ever released, it is probably the first to fully showcase the wide variety of civilian and military roles from a first person perspective. For many years I have heard members of our community as for something akin to the popular first person shooters but helicopter centric. ToH is the first to do so.

Let’s be very clear about one key point, this is a game and not a simulation. If you are looking for this to have the flight model fidelity of FSX or X-Plane you will be disappointed. That said the third party flight model included is a step above that in their ARMA II series and provides you with a rough approximation of helicopter flight. We’ll discuss the flight model and it’s shortcomings in a bit.

ToH does not simulate the whole Earth like FSX or X-Plane. Your missions are focused on two very large maps, the greater Seattle area and a fictional representation of Afghanistan. They are nicely detailed and on par with maps you would find in most modern first person shooters. I would describe the textures, lighting and object rendering more along the artistic vein than realistic but nicely done and very high quality.

The helicopters are not specific models but representation of a light, a medium, and a heavy airframes. While I am sure some die-hards won’t care for this approach it is done to keep the studio out of licensing and trademark issues with the aircraft manufactures. That said you can clearly see where they drew their inspiration. The light class is clear a representation of the MD-500, the medium a Bell 412 and the heavy a NH-90. They are all nicely rendered and textures with 3D cockpits that have some limited click-able areas for start and shutdown. The sounds are well done as well.

The basic single player storyline in comprised of ten missions centered around struggling Larkin Aviation, a family run flight business. You play Tom Larkin younger brother of Joe Larkin. You’ve returned home after your father’s death to help your brother. Unfortunately, things get complicated very quickly. Sprinkled in between the missions are Joe’s flashback missions in South Asia. I understand why they presented them in that fashion as part of the character development and story line but personally I found them rather distracting. In addition to those you also have some civilian and government missions you can do for a total of 18 in the career mode.

Beyond the career missions you have the option to do free flight, training, or a wide variety of single missions that change each time you play them. There are also some challenging time trails that are well laid out and quite fun to hone your skills on. The real fun is going to be when the user community starts building their own missions with the built in editor.

The built in editor is a very powerful tool. It is what we all wished Microsoft included with FSX. Not only that there is an excellent sample mission and a training video online on building missions. Supposedly you can develop missions for standalone and multiplayer flights. I cannot wait to see what some creative folks come up with.

Unfortunately I have not had a lot of time or opportunity to test out multiplayer beyond a sample flight or two. Just enough to say it works and has potential. You can share the cockpit and swap controls. However we did find one bug in that swapping the controls in the medium helicopter while flying kills the engine. This is going to be fixed in an upcoming patch. Audio is also handled inside the application or you can continue to use Teamspeak, or Skype as you see fit.

As I stated earlier the flight model is better than their previous ARMA titles but is below what we are used to in FSX or X-Plane. In general here are some of the issues the team reported:

• All three models have a very slight (but very annoying) lag in the controls.


• Torque induced yaw is present, but it is barely apparent.


• Ground effect is over-exaggerated on all three models.
  The medium and heavy helicopters have a tendency to roll left with down collective and roll right with up collective.


• The descent rates are acceptable for the medium and heavy helos, but the light helicopter only descends at about 500 fpm with full down collective.