Simulator Sundays; 1: Enemy Engaged: RAH-66 Comanche Vs. KA-52 Hokum

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• published: 21 Jun 2015
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A new concept for me, let's see how this goes with a game with a very long name. Razorworks Enemy Engaged RAH-66 Comanche Vs. KA-52 Hokum is a flight simulator and the second game published by Razorworks in 2000, following Enemy Engaged Apache Havok. The base game has two flyable aircraft types and a small inventory of weaponry which can be used to customize payloads in campaign missions. On one side, there is the highly advanced RAH-66 Comanche. Using stealth technology and electronic warfare, the Comanche was intended to be the ideal recon aircraft. Sneaking undetected through enemy territory, Comanche detects enemy positions and marks them for airstrikes, before leaving, having never been detected. On the other is the KA-52 Hokum. Technologically at least, Hokum is pretty much inferior to Comanche. It does not enjoy the same level of sophistication, lacking stealth technology. However, being sneaky was never a design goal of Hokum. It is first and foremost a gunship: It attacks enemy positions from whatever angle and with whatever weaponry is best. Thanks to its highly unusual design, it is faster than Comanche (though slower in the cruise) while carrying somewhat more weaponry and much more protective armour over twice the distance. The campaign is made of a series of missions made via procedural generation. For example: An AI helicopter might come under fire from enemy anti-aircraft systems, the command AI can then request a recon mission to determine the precise location of the AA position, upon completion of that a strike mission can be carried out, followed by another recon mission to ensure it is completely destroyed. A failure to complete any of those stages, either because the AA position destroyed the offending aircraft or the player collided into the ground can completely change the direction of the war as the command AI tries to compensate. While the procedural generation ensures that the campaigns are never quite the same (the openings are pretty much identical in every play-through, owing to identical starting conditions), it can result in a limited number of mission types. Razorworks ceased to exist in 2008 owing to the poor situation of Enterprise Entertainment, the publisher that owned them. Enterprise closed in 2009. Enemy Engaged was the first two games made by Razorworks, out of a total of 14 PC and console titles. In 2007, G2 Games released "Enemy Engaged 2". In essence, it's the same game with updated graphics and more bugs. In 2003, the source code was released for EE:RAH-66 Vs. KA-52 and has resulted in a massive update to the game which I will be looking at in future. Owing to its age, RAH-66 Comanche Vs. KA-52 Hokum barely works on modern computers, I had a great deal of difficulty getting the game to display anything, ultimately a new graphics card (an unrelated upgrade) solved some of the problems. However, the menu screen flickers and terrain features, when displayed at a low angle, often disappear (In the video, I blame it on a bad Anisotrophic filter, unable to cope with the angle it is being asked to render on hardware it was never designed to cope with). Plus there are missing textures, bad models, a nice quantity of bugs and a sloppy AI. However, I feel that age is the main culprit here and that despite this, the game has aged well (if it can be made to work). Pros: Massive "living" battlefield, no campaign will be quite the same Options to customize dynamics Can integrate with previous title, bringing new aircraft into the fray Modding community have released a massive overhaul for the game Cons: Poor, if any, compatibility with modern computers (Vista and earlier should be fine) Procedural missions have limited variation, can become repetitive Dynamics are crude (owing to the age of the game, this is probably a limit of technology more than anything) NO VOLUME SLIDERS!