chelon is the science-fiction flight sim created by Russia's Buka Entertainment and distributed by Bethesda Softworks. In a game full of eye candy, players fly their craft through dust, over water with reflections, past buildings large and small and amidst lots and lots of hills and mountains. There are 50 types of friendly and enemy craft, and players can fly 14 different aircraft and fit them with 16 different types of weapons. There is a multiplayer mode that allows deathmatch and co-op play.
The single-player mode starts the player as a lieutenant on a colony world of the Galaxy Federation. The excellent intro movie explains the galactic history that led to the formation of the Federation and its encounter with the Velians, who are the game's villains. Players fly a series of missions, gaining rank and experience, which lets them fly different aircraft and command other wings of ships. The campaign is branching, so that the players have some choice in which missions they want to fly.
The flight model in Echelon is a mixture of arcade and simulation. The controls are simple by simulation standards and complicated by arcade standards. Most of the craft hover, and fuel is not an issue. Each has its own selection of hard points, and the weapons loads can be customized as players learn what they like and what works. The HUD contains details of heading, altitude and speed, plus navigation and targeting information. The craft can be flown with a keyboard and mouse combination, but, as with most flying games, a joystick is best.
Easy to learn, difficult to master
Learning to play Echelon takes a combination of reading the manual and playing the tutorial. Each teaches some things that the other doesn't. For instance, the flight control keys are in the manual, but how to land is in the tutorial. The added fun comes from the translation of the the manual and the voice acting, which leads to such smile-producing comments as a wingman announcing "I got severe damages."
Less humorous is the computer AI. Players will quickly learn to dodge missiles by ducking behind hills; AI-piloted craft never do this. Worse is when the player's wingmen rush ahead to be chewed to death by the enemy craft, forcing the player to fight alone against hopeless odds, and making the mission impossible for the player to finish. There is much better dogfighting to be had battling other humans than there is fighting the computer.
The small touches in the graphics, like the reflecting water and the ejecting shell casings, are pretty cool. The environments are huge, which can be a disadvantage in the long escort missions where the player flies from point A to B over what is mostly plain brown terrain. Plus, graphics always seem a little wasted in flight sims, where most of the time the enemy craft is so far away that it is only a few pixels. The full detail is only on display for a flash as the craft rushes past. Luckily, the targeting system is quick to learn and easy to use.
Echelon is an easy game to learn, but a hard one to master; once I learned the controls well enough to stop hitting mountains, my first kill was by unintentionally ramming the enemy fighter. The lack of control over your wingmen is very annoying in the later scenarios, and the flying really is
much better with a joystick.
-- Eric
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