Преглед на симулатор "Digital Combat Simulator: Black Shark"
Година: 2008
Издател: DCS
Линкове за сваляне: zamunda.net
Трейлър: youtube.com
Коментари: forum.listovkite.com
Описание:
Pity the poor flight sim. Once a staple ingredient of any PC gamer's diet, these incredibly complex pieces of software have since become a rare delicacy enjoyed by a hidden audience. Once upon a time every second game on the PC was a flight sim, but their limelight slowly petered out as more accessible genres engulfed the PC. Yet there's still a sizable audience of virtual Mavericks out there, eagerly waiting for the latest virtual cockpit. Sadly though, this large yet quiet audience doesn't justify the development attention it once did, and the result has been a dearth of sims. Simmers have watched in horror as their beloved genre gasped its dying breath over the last few years, with only re-releases of older games, and the promise of a handful of titles, to keep them going. Digital Combat Simulator: Black Shark (BS) was one of those titles, and has been in development for what feels like decades. Built by the same team who released the critically acclaimed Flanker series, and its follow-up, the gorgeous but not so well received Lock On Modern Air Combat, BS has pedigree simming DNA. These crazy Russians – now known as Eagle Dynamics – have been guided by an ex Ubi-producer to go it alone for this title, releasing it online via their site for US$49.99. Once you've read the review, you can pop over here to purchase it if the score to your right gets your joystick all tingly. And yes, that price stays the same regardless of which region you purchase it from, unlike certain other digital distribution services.
Enough about the genre and the developer though, let's dig into Black Shark, the finest flight simulator to hit the PC since IL2 graced our screens back in 2001. Dammit, I've already given away how amazing this game is. Black Shark's like that though – it's one of a select few games that make lovers of aviation blabber on to the closest poor soul about how cool it is that somebody has modelled the vortex ring state in a chopper sim.
So, the Black Shark. Otherwise known as the KA-50, it's an odd looking attack chopper by Western standards. It doesn't have the usual tail rotor thanks to its contra-rotating dual rotors on top. It's a single-seater, and has an odd mixture of analogue and digital controls. Deadly by day, but crippled at night, she's a hard bird to tame thanks to the quirks of helicopter flight. And it's the only chopper you'll fly in this game, as BS is what is known as a study sim. Unlike titles such as IL2 and LOMAC, where there's a whole airport worth of aircraft to fly, BS sticks to one aircraft, but models it to exacting detail. The 380 page manual is evidence of just how much info the developers got when they worked with Kamov (the makers of the real chopper).
Like the magnificent Falcon 4, the KA-50 in this game has a fully clickable pit. Nearly every single one of the hundreds of switches in the cockpit actually works. Simply starting the engines and taking off takes 51 different switches and buttons. The ABRIS computer within the cockpit even goes through a full boot up process when you switch it on (according to the BIOS boot screen it's powered by a DX4 CPU and 2GB of RAM – this is 90s technology at its best). Blades ice up if you forget to turn the deicing on at high altitude; blades come into crunching contact if you flail about at high speed.
Mastering all of these systems is one thing, but then there's the complexity of what is quite possibly the finest flight model we've ever piloted. Both Flanker, and the LOMAC expansion Flaming Cliffs, were known for their impressive ability to recreate the way a plane handles, taking the airborne rollercoasters seen in other sims off their virtual rails. Black Shark goes one further, modelling precisely how these birds handle. We should know, as we took our first chopper lesson a month before buying the game. But if you don't believe us, the dozens of real life pilots on the official forums, all singing praise for how accurately this virtual KA-50 handles, should convince you.
Combine the dozens of different systems with this amazing flight model, and you end up with one incredibly hard game. It makes Eve Online's economy look shallow by comparison. And that's the point of this game. The more you put into it, the more satisfaction there is when all of these complex systems come together to turn that enemy tank into a smoking pile of slag and meat. There are options to set the game up in easy mode for novice flyers, but you're missing out on 90% of the fun if you fly it that way. And if you want an arcade sim, BS can't compete with the graphical delights of the likes of Ace Combat.
It might not be quite up there with Ace Combat in the visual stakes, but looking at the screenshots, you can see just how beautifully the KA-50 has been modelled. Everything down to the last rivet is in place, and the damage effects are equally impressive. The gorgeous visuals don't stop with the chopper though. Considering the view distance is in the hundreds of kilometres, the terrain detail is meticulous. Forests and mountains are stunning, though cities could still do with some work, especially considering how much performance they zap from this CPU-bottlenecked game. Sadly most trees don't have a collision map, so you can fly right through 'em Slimer style, but it's a performance trade-off you'll soon come to accept. Ground and air units, both friendly and the unkind type, are generally stunningly rendered, though there are still a few nasty leftovers from this game's LOMAC origins.
Overall it's a very pretty picture, and thankfully running these stunning visuals are nowhere near as demanding as this game's LOMAC predecessor. We averaged a frame rate of around 35 to 50 fps using a Core2 Duo processor overclocked to 4GHz, 4GB of RAM, an 8800GTX and Vista 64-bit edition. In extremely busy scenes, it would dip to 19fps or so, adequate for the slower pace of a sim. Note that this game is a CPU pig, and also gets a sizable performance increase when the combination of Vista and dual cores is applied. Ok, so our system isn't exactly a slouch, but LOMAC ran like a pig on high end systems of its time. A 3GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM and a mid-level graphics card should give you more than playable performance.
Considering the campaign has a hell of a lot more going on in it than LOMAC, this smooth performance is no mean feat. Unlike the sterile –face it, tedious – campaign of LOMAC and IL2, BS has two epic yet linear campaigns which are a perfect blend of action, set pieces, variety and random elements. Thanks to the inclusion of new random triggers in the mission editor, there's always a random element to how a mission will play out, so even though it's fairly linear, you'll still be surprised every now and then. The mission editor has been given a huge overhaul and given its own 180 page manual. We're pretty sure the thriving community will have delivered many more campaigns by the time we beat the one included with the game sometime in a few months.
UPDATE: since posting this review, the game's producer dropped us a friendly note to let us know that the campaign isn't as linear as we'd thought. Depending on how you go in a mission, you can be served up one of four different follow-up missions, each of which has random variables. So once you've completed the campaign, you'll be able to play through it many times and not have the same mission set twice. Nice.
Though we've only played online as two player co-op, we're happy to report that it was a flawless experience with very little lag and no crashes. Taking almost three hours to finish a single mission, the handful of missions included will give you and a buddy at least ten hours of fun, but there are already stacks of co-op missions available online. Having said that, it would have been amazing if the campaign was fully co-op compatible, but it seems that a patch is in the works which will make it easy to convert the single player one into one.
If there is one issue with BS, it's that old simming bug bear, AI. Unfortunately the AI of the game hasn't advanced as far as the other systems. In the case of ground units, it's very predictable, tending to drive in straight lines, if it takes evasive action at all. In the case of friendly wingmen, it can be idiotically stupid. Generally your wingmen will manage to stay alive, but far too often they'll zoom into the hot zone to attack rather than deploying weapons from stand-off range. Having said that, we're only a month into playing this game, so perhaps there are intricacies to the datalink system and radio commands which can change all that. DCS is the kind of game that takes years, rather than months, to master.
Closing Comments
We could keep going on about how polished BS is for a sim, or how insanely stable it is, or the astonishing lack of bugs, but we’d rather you experience the game than listen to us blather on about it. If you’ve fostered dreams of being a pilot, or love old-school complicated PC games, or are a simmer on the fence about a game with relatively little exposure, help support the simming genre and have a damn good time while you’re at it. On the other hand, if you get bored reading manuals or prefer arcade action flyers, stay the hell away from this virtual cockpit.
For those who love these types of games though, this is just the beginning of a beautiful story, as Black Shark is but one of the first of many modules to plug into the DCS engine. New aircraft will be released on a nine-month cycle, with the A-10, AH-64, Hind-D and many others on the horizon. As a result we’re confident in saying that the flight simming genre has been given a second lease of life almost singlehandedly by this one developer. Kudos to Eagle Dynamics and its beautiful rendition of Kamov’s deadliest chopper.