Police Week: Police Helicopter Simulator

Police Week really should have been called Fuzz Fortnight. Law enforcement games are legion and last week I barely scratched the surface of what’s available. My latest acquisition puts the copper in chopper. It also shoots itself in both flat feet with poor controller support and pedantic sorties.

One of the golden rules of sim design in Germany seems to be ‘Thou shalt always fashion an extensive 3D base-of-operations for your player’. Police Helicopter Simulator’s homely hub…

…is spread over four floors…

…and incorporates useable beds, flushable WCs, interactive hand driers, and some of the dullest art ever hung on a virtual wall.

It features a kitchen with a tempting selection of lovingly crafted pickles and compot. (During the tutorial, I lost my peripatetic/impatient guide because I spent too long admiring these jars).

…and a rec room with an annoyingly untunable radio and unfixable trip hazard.

Once strapped into the game’s Eurocopter 135, more telling aggravations emerge.

During randomly generated sorties over a fairly large, fictional landscape studded with towns, industrial facilities, and other points of interest, if you stray above the ‘maximum flight altitude’ for even a second your shift is abruptly terminated.

Unsanctioned landings are punished just as swiftly and harshly. On an uneventful patrol and fancy doing some training touch-and-gos in a field, car park, or clearing? Forget it.

While you could argue the fussiness and the inflexibility fits the theme and doesn’t have any long-term impact (However poor your track record, you never seem to get sacked or grounded), there’s no defending the sim’s woeful lack of controller support.

As PHS refused to recognise my joystick, gamepad, and InterLink, and comes with almost no control customisation options, I’ve been flying with WASD and cursor keys. Thanks to a forgiving flight model that doesn’t do wind, VRS, or retreating blade stalls, and makes hovering a whirlybird seem incredibly easy, this is no barrier to sortie success. All the same, when a game sports the Aerosoft logo and claims “flight dynamics for beginners and advanced players” it’s hard not to feel disappointed.