Air Missions: HIND – by Whippy
Genre: Indie Action Helicopter Flight Sim
Developer: 3Division
Publisher: 3Division
Release Date: Mar 21, 2016
Surprisingly, no land missions.
Air Missions: HIND is a helicopter simulator in early access. Your mission is to take out enemy convoys, enemy bases, and pick up your troops who are kept hostage. You progress through various missions unlocking new gear for your Russian Mi-24 Hind assault helicopter, otherwise known as the “Flying Tank”, to unleash even more damage onto your foes. Air Missions: HIND is being developed by 3Division and they clearly know what they are doing. Air Missions: HIND is a very fun game, but it’s not flawless.
As I went into my first mission, I was met with a well done tutorial teaching me how to fly the helicopter and use its wonky controls, its ‘W’ to go up, ‘S’ to go down, ‘A’ to go left and ‘D’ to go right, seems simple but these are not ideal. I found this confusing and hard to control the helicopter at times, you can also point the direction of the helicopter by using the mouse which is what I used to line up with the enemy. But an ideal control configuration is ‘Q’ to go up and ‘Z’ to go down while ‘W’ points the helicopter down and ‘S’ points it up, this way I can control the speed of the helicopter with the keyboard and aim up with the mouse without having to worry about aiming my mouse down off my target to get the helicopter to pick up speed to do a bombing run. But I guess this is what key configuration is for. I changed the keys and I was in business.
The Russian helicopter was very hard to control at first, I was having lots of trouble getting my targets into my line of sight. The game also felt really laggy, and to my surprise I was running at a mere 25 frames per second which made aiming a nightmare, so to remove any lag I dropped the settings to low and almost straight away I was able to kill my targets and the helicopter felt much smoother to fly. I then continued with the very helpful tutorial which went over what button did what and gave me an example of what I’d be doing in the air. The flying was fun and I had an enjoyable time controlling the helicopter, I honestly felt like I was controlling something in the air that had weight and was physical, not some helicopter that’s bigger than a tank and faster than a jet like other games.
On the first mission I went in to destroy some ground units and I was amazed at how good the shooting felt. Shooting a rocket down to the ground felt like I was sending hell down, shooting my bullets felt awesome too. When I destroyed a tank there was a massive explosion, and an even bigger one if I was using a guided missile which was unlocked after completing a mission. After every mission you are rewarded with a new gun for your helicopter to blow up tanks and ground units. And that’s what kind of bugged me, “ground units” but what type of units? Americans? Indians? AUSTRALIANS? I honestly have no clue; the enemy is always listed as “enemy insert object here unit” or objective titles would be “Don’t let the enemy tank reach our troops!” even the steam store page doesn’t list who I’m shooting and what for other than to protect myself. I can only guess that I’m playing the Russians because I’m using a Russian helicopter. Which is also the only helicopter in the game, you can customize the weapons on it, which is useful depending what mission you are on!
Got moving targets? Use the manually controlled (and super fun) guided missiles! Got a AA on the ground? Light it up with 52 missiles! But be wary, you have limited reloads for your weapons, your bullets count in this game, so don’t go around using up all your rockets on a single bloke because he’s far away. Enemies can be really far away in this game; it feels like maps can go on forever. Even on the lowest details I found the game to look okay, the cockpit looked detailed and animations still played smoothly. Sound design is worked well into the game, rockets sounded like rockets and helicopters sounded like helicopters with high quality, I was never taken out of the immersion because of sound problems.
Air Missions: HIND‘s missions have no story to them other than the fact of being there to have something to do. They’re also repetitive, go here, shoot this, defend that, don’t die. There are some missions that differ slightly, for example I had to rescue my team from being hostage, so I was put into the side gunner of a helicopter and slaughtered anyone in my way, I wish I could see more of those, maybe drive a tank at one point? But the experience of those missions is what makes up for that repetition. The game also supports multiplayer but since no one out of my 158 steam friends had the game, I couldn’t try the online because I never found anyone on the servers. So consider the online to be dead.
Air Missions: HIND is a fantastic singleplayer helicopter shooter experience. I had an enjoyable time with the game, it’s also bug free from what I can tell, which is something unheard of with most Early Access games. I found that while there aren’t many missions to complete in the game, I still had fun in the ones I played. I recommend Air Missions: HIND to anyone that is an army enthusiast or is looking for a good helicopter shooter.
Whippy gives Air Missions: HIND a Drastik Measure 7.8 out of 10 (78).
PROS:
- Fun to fly
- Weapons are awesome to shoot
- Maps are dense and large
- Detailed cockpit views
CONS:
- Needs optimization
- Only 15 missions
