Remember that mission from GTA: Vice City, where you’ve to control an RC helicopter to plant C4 inside a building? Yeah, how can anyone forget that one, the number of reloads that went into that particular mission? In fact, I had retried it so much that the name of the mission had been imprinted in my brain – Demolition Man (no, not the Sylvester Stallone movie). And retrying was overwhelmingly frustrating because once your helicopter is destroyed by those low poly-goons, it is set back to the beginning i.e the lowest level of the building. No doubt I grew up to resent flying sims or even flying mini-games in any title whatsoever because the controls were always so difficult to grasp for my childish brain. That was until I played Comanche.
The Future is Now!
Gone are the days when you piloted a rusty Huey to shoot up Saddam’s bases in the middle of the desert. Times have changed and so is technology. Now is the era of cyberwarfare, unmanned aerial drones, and highly maneuverable stealth war machine impervious to mountainous terrain. A new era of special units called Comanches has evolved and that has completely changed the aerial battlefield scenario. Equipped with machine guns, normal missiles, homing missiles, and a rapidly deployable UAVs, these metal ninjas have ruled the skies since the 1990s, from the time of voxel graphics. But now, it’s all changed for the better, perhaps to cater to a wider group of audience. Because contrary to what the earlier Comanche games were (they were flying sims), this one is quite… ‘arcadey’.
Technically speaking, it’s somewhere in the middle. It’s not like those flying sequences from Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 or Advanced Warfare and definitely not like the flying sequence from Battlefield 1. What I mean to say is the controls are not complicated like a sim and yet you’ve to take into account the roll, pitch, and yaw to maneuver accordingly while avoiding a nose dive into the water below. Your Comanche has a health bar and limited arsenal, which can get refilled after completing a chapter. Also, and quite impossibly, the Comanches are designed to withstand short plunges into the water (prolonged seconds underwater damages the chopper until it explodes). There’s flight assist as well to make the controls even more watered down, but that hinders any sudden evasive action when you’re pulling off aerial stunts while peppering down on the enemies. But if you keep it off, it might take a while to get used to it, unless you deliberately want your Comanche plummet from the sky and plunge into the sea or smash the rocks.
There’s a tutorial, broken off into Basic, Medium, and Advanced, and it’s better to get your hands on the cycle with flight assist off, as fighting the boats and enemy chopper while negotiating tight spaces can be a tad difficult. I just wish this game allowed us to switch to third person perspective because when I first started playing, I used to crash into the water a lot while banking and firing. The only time the game goes third person is when you launch the surveillance quad-rotor drone from the Comanche’s underbelly. Needless to say, that underpowered mosquito won’t help you in dogfights and you’ll have to stick to the Rhino for that. But this point I can’t decide whether even the Rhino is good to take on enemies. Because all you got in your arsenal is an inaccurate autocannon (unless you’re really close), default secondary dumb missiles that don’t do shit unless your targeting module is aligned with the target, and a limited amount of homing missiles (which should have been our default secondary weapon instead). So much for futuristic warfare.
Since the game is still in Early Access (glorified alpha build), only one mission is available to play. Divided into five chapters you start by accessing the Black Box of a downed friendly vehicle then head into the valley to take on enemy boats, choppers, radio jammers, and even a ship. All you’ll be doing is clearing areas of a nameless enemy faction so that you’re friendly Russian ‘Handyman’ can sail through. However, this latest installment has something that makes it different from the earlier Comanche games i.e. the drone sequences (cue Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Watch_Dogs 2, etc). It’s similar to what I would expect from drone control sequences in other games i.e. infiltrating enemy bases via air vents or conveniently broken windows and hack into terminals to open doors for your Comanche. Not very innovative I know. We’ve seen that a lot of times in many games already where you momentarily control a smaller character to squeeze into tiny spaces.
There’s multiplayer PvP as well with only two modes for now. The first one is team deathmatch and the second one is an objective-based 4v4, both taking places in a generic forest and a snowcapped mountain base. But matchmaking is a complete drag, in fact, I went to have dinner while in the lobby and when I got back after 15 minutes, I was still in the lobby. Granted, it is a relatively unknown Early Access title with low playerbase. And even then the Early Access built has made the multiplayer quite lackluster, completely opposite to what was there in the trailer. Lackluster in the sense that for a game based on helicopters, it feels like I’m playing a generic fps where the main character can fly.
Verdict
Comanche, as it now stands in its alpha build obviously requires a lot of polish. It’s confused whether it should cater to mainstream audience or hardcore flight-sim veterans, and tries to stand on two boats at once. Sadly it fails to do so and for the price, it’s available on steam, I think you should give it time to improve and add more content to be added.
