Review by Anmac
Overview
Custom picture and good mission description, but with lots of room at the bottom of the page I though having the email and web address on the following page pointless.
Intro
Editor driven, adequate and not too long. ;)) Although marks were lost on the Intro due to it being totally dark and without night vision enabled.
Intros and outros set after sunset should either have lighting or night vision enabled. I know a lot of you players have your screens brighter than the sun at 1000 kms and are able to play night missions without night vision but that’s not realistic or the way BIS intended the game to be played. Nighttime is dark! That’s why the computer gods gave us N.V.. ;)
Briefing
Nicely spaced briefings are so pleasant to read. Especially when there’s lots of detail. Details like a manual on how to use A.S.T.S. add to the professional feel. …A.S.T.S.? You’ll see.
There were only a couple of small things I would changed:
- one or two more links i.e. your starting point
- on the notes page the player's ‘dear mom’ letter spilled over to the A.S.T.S. manual page and last text said something like ‘read the manual on the next page’. But it was on the same page.
LIKE I SAID, THEY WERE ONLY SMALL THINGS! ;)
Mission
Well this mission has been around a long time. Just read the .txt file to get an idea. It’s not the most complex mission to ever pass through cyberspace but it has some nice features to make it different.
One such feature is the presence of resistance fighters. This doesn’t mean you will have help… well it does sort of… The resistance are scared of the dark and therefore will shoot anything that moves. U.S. or Russian! So they may help thinning the number of Russians but at the same time remove your leadership burden by killing your squad.
The other feature is … that’s right … A.S.T.S. This is Toadlife’s script for assigning targets for the fixed wing aircraft flying nearby. It was quite fiddly however and I felt it needed some improvements. The script uses the radio and action menu. But when the action menu is used it disappears and you have to select it again then scroll to the right option then select it again. If these commands were moved to the radio the ‘increase’ and ‘decrease distance’ options could be used faster. I know this will not allow you to see the hint indicator but a moveable marker would be just a good.
Regardless of its ease of use, this feature allowed me to complete the two objectives with one attack run of the aircraft.
Then all I had to do was kill the remaining troops and move to the evac point. Which was on the other side of the enemy troops. If it wasn’t for this, the mission would be too easy and all over in 5 minutes.
Some of the A.I. reacted poorly but overall it was ok.
Outro(s)
The mission finished with a ‘cutscene’ that was used instead of a real outro. This had N.V. enabled and showed the evac vehicle moving off into the distance. Not being long enough to bore was a plus.
Overall
(Review Date: May 2002) All in all, nothing great but there is fun to be had.
P.S. If you compare this review with the one of v1 you will see a higher standard is expected of today’s missions. Things that were rarely seen have now become a basic requirement.
This score is comparative to equivalent missions reviewed recently here in CHQ.
