Getting back to bugs though – it is clear that EE2 is riddled with bugs that should have been discovered and corrected prior to shipping. There is a distinction between bugs and features that we wish could have been ported over from the ever evolving EECH source code work. As far as I’m concerned, a person that has never flown the modded EECH should be able to load up EE2 and have a relatively bug-free experience. Unfortunately, even a neophyte EE2 simmer will notice some of the glaring problems with this sim. My abbreviated list looks something like this:
- controller names truncated in setup screen
- right side ALT, SHIFT, and CTRL keys do not work on keyboard (you have to use the left ones)
- right ALT-K, which is supposed to let you adjust your altitude while in altitude hold, causes you to explode
- airbases that don’t exist
- walls in the sky and other terrain elevation anomalies
- aircraft paths / taxi-routes in some places don’t match the airport layout
- with the cockpit graphics off the inset box FLIR often doesn’t show objects at certain zoom levels
- typos on some of the cockpit indicators
- PDF manuals that refer to functions or features that existed in EECH but not EE2
- poor introduction / text description of the Korea theater
- large numbers of infantry are invisible (at least on the Korea map)
- several objects have mirrored (reversed) lettering on one side of the object
- the FLIR targeting box movement doesn’t appear to work correctly
- windshield wipers don’t appear to work
- destroyed structures (such as power station cooling towers) will be gone, but you can still run into them
- turning the wheel brakes off on the ground results in helicopter sliding in all cases (even with engine off)
That is the short list, there are definitely more. And there is, of course, a huge list of things all of us fans of EECH were hoping would actually be fixed or improved in EE2 which is obviously not the case. My short list of desired improvements:
- AI wingmen occasionally fly hundreds of feet above the player in formation (suicidal)
- moving ships
- better ground war movement (true ground battles and none of the “camping” at nodes)
- improved AI flying routines (the AI flies jerky, robotic flight paths)
- some sort of progressive damage model on the objects (holes in wings, missing parts, etc.)
- a more realistic and less mechanical acting autopilot (the autopilot flies like the AI)
- improved ATC and radio voices
- pilot / co-pilot-gunner multi-player in the same helicopter
- more and varied units and tactics that would be appropriate to distinctive theaters
- a bit more atmospheric modeling with areas of fog, differing cloud layers, turbulence, and snow
Again, there are many more items I would include on my “wish” list but you get the idea. These were things (and more) I think we all hoped for in EE2.
In Part 3, we will go through more comparisons and look at more of EE2s scenery.
Reviewer System Specs
- Alienware Pentium 4, 3.4GHz
- 2 GB DDR2 SDRAM
- NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT PCI Express 256MB
- Saitek X52 Stick
- CH Products Pro Pedals
- NaturalPoint TrackIR4 PRO
Note: For illustrative purposes some of the images in this article were cropped or marked on in order to highlight certain aspects of the software. All images were captured at 1280 x 1024 and were reduced in size and quality for bandwidth purposes.
We want your Feedback. Please let us know what you thought of this article here.
If you missed any of the other reports in this review series,
you’ll find them here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
