When I was in high school, I came within a whisker of signing up with the Army National Guard under the premise that I would be put into the helicopter pilot training program. In fact, they wanted me to sign up on a Wednesday, and join the local unit on a weekend campout the following Friday. On my way to sign the papers, I decided that college sounded like the better approach, but I have always wondered what flying the Apache would have been like. Apache Longbow Attack gave me that chance and it was a blast.

Longbow doesn't give you a lot of instruction in the finer points of piloting a helicopter. The documentation barely gets you going on the game, and the missions are introduced by a scant text introduction rather than the multimedia briefing discerning video game fans have come to expect. Once you launch into your first missions, you have to scratch your head and wonder just how helicopter pilots you see on the movies make it look so easy to swoop down and blow away the baddies, because handling your collective, throttle, and rudder is not exactly as intuitive as flying a plane. In fact, just trying to shoot a moving vehicle is more about positioning your aircraft to take the shot than actually shooting. But isn't that much more realistic and true to life? Once you get used to the mechanics, you really start to get immersed into the feeling that you are flying a real machine.

Your armaments include the famous chain gun, which you have the option of manually targeting with the mouse, as well as various devastating missiles that you can lock on to the targets you select. True hard-core Apache fans will notice that the lock on after fire feature is not present, and the various radar functions, flight controls, etc, have been simplified for the game experience, but this tends to help the game be more approachable to a wider variety of gamers.

In-flight aerodynamics seem to be fairly realistic. You have to be careful not to exceed the limitations of the airframe during your maneuvers. This is not a fighter jet able to pull 7 G turns in order to evade and escape. You have to understand how to manipulate the controls in order to make your ship dance. As you will have ground to air missiles, air to air missiles, and AA to avoid, you need to quickly learn these abilities.

The plot of the campaign is pretty thin, so the primary thrust of the game is simply the experience of piloting the flying tank, which is a blast. If you demand an engrossing plot, and extensive modes of gameplay, etc, you may want to look elsewhere. If all you want to do is fly the Apache without committing years of your life to the military, get Apache Longbow and take off.