DropShip United Peace Force

Compared to other flight-combat games such as Lethal Skies or Ace Combat 04, Dropship goes way beyond the call of duty when it comes to gameplay variety. Over the course of its 20 missions, you'll blow up a dam, scan trucks for weapons, drop tanks into warzones, steal an experimental gunship, and man a turret while the computer-controlled co-pilot does the flying or driving. Oh, did I say driving? That's the kicker: Many missions here let you whiz around in tanks, troop carriers and other vehicles. One level has you burning rubber through an enemy base to bust out POWs. In another, you cruise around the bad guys' depot on a stealthy spy mission. By all rights, this game should be a couch-potato pilot's dream come true. So why did my spirits sink every time I sat through new level briefings and watched mission objectives pile up? Because I knew I'd have to retry those missions over and over. Dropship's difficulty cranks up to the extreme about a third of the way into the game, partly because avoiding enemy missiles is nearly impossible (don't forget to land for repairs) and partly because of your wimpy weaponry. This game's damage sirens and enemy lock-on buzzers still haunt my nightmares. You'll spend most of your time repeating missions until you've memorized exactly what to do every step of the way, and where's the fun in that? Mid-level checkpoints would have made it all more bearable.

Dropship is a game that only the passive-aggressive will enjoy; if shuttling supplies around is your idea of a good time, then hop aboard. In the game, you eventually do "go aggro" with jets and tanks, but not before enduring a series of difficult dropship missions. It's frustrating because many of these missions require accuracy and precision (spy an enemy base and keep your head below the radar while scanning multiple targets), yet your dropship controls like a 747 when it should handle like a chopper. The mission progression helps things get, but the leaden controls and graphical sterility weigh down an otherwise decent action game.

When I think Dropship, I think of that olive-green war machine we saw in Aliens with the missiles on its wings and a belly full of colonial Marines. Well, Dropship does a great job of re-creating that gritty sci-fi realism. When you're hovering over the hot zone, you actually feel as though there's a real battle happening below you. Look closely enough and you may even catch some infantry-on-tank action between the ground forces. But no amount of atmosphere can mask Dropship's repetitive, pre-scripted missions and lack of combat dynamics. It also doesn't help that the game's simplistic graphics just aren't up to snuff by today's standards.