G5 - Red Shark
The player will control a helicopter that looks like Ka-50, flies at speeds Ka-50 flies at, and is armed with weapons real Ka-50s are armed with, that is 30mm cannon, "Vikhr" and "S-8" missiles. Although we made cannon ammo infinite we tried to keep missile supply realistic.

G5 - Red Shark
There are more than 10 ground enemy units the player will face in the game. These include German tanks, anti-airs, trucks, jeeps, panzerfausts, infantry tents, etc. There are also several types of Soviet units the player will see - tanks (T-34), "Katushas", trucks. And there are about 60 types of different ground structures the player will see in the game. The majority of the units are based on real units the player could have encountered should he travel back to the time of WWII.

G5 - Red Shark
The player will fight in 3 areas: Russia, Western Europe-Russia border, and Libya (Northern Africa). Missions are kept in correspondence with the global flow of events at these locations at the time of WWII. But this was not our #1 priority -- we wanted a very dynamic and thrilling missions and we had to sacrifice historical accuracy to achieve this, so local events in the missions are pure fiction.

G5 - Red Shark
Missions in Red Shark feature up to several hundreds active units on the territory up to 256 sq.km. The idea of the game is that the helicopter is sent to the past to correct some major events that lead to the very bad consequences. The player will feel involved in a big military operations -- the events will develop even without the player's interaction -- the player will see tank battles, convoys under attack, enemy officers escaping the ambushes -- and change the outcome if he can. We think this is something different to what can be seen in other helicopter games.
We should also mention 3rd person helicopter view, destructable 3d trees and structures, but it's probably no longer something new :)

G5 - Red Shark
If "hardcore sim-pilot" is a person who is mostly interested in very realistic heli controls and physics and is looking for a kind of military trainer rather than a game, then probably yes. And not only because of the controls. We made gameplay very dynamic and arcade, you have to destroy tens if not hundreds of targets during the single mission. And if we stick to the "real" controls and physics, the player will not be able to complete a single mission in the game, because with "real" controls and physics flying a heli is tricky. Red Shark a shooter in the sky. WASD controls, mouse look, right button aim, left button shoot, do it fast and never stop or you will be a perfect target.

G5 - Red Shark
There are 15 missions combined into a mission-tree. When you complete a mission, you open up to two other missions and you can choose which way down the tree to go. There are 4 difficulty levels available in the game affecting health points of the heli and the amount of weapons given in the beginning of the mission. Depending on the difficulty level, you will get a decoration for every mission you complete and another for all completed missions.
Replays will differ if played on different difficulty levels -- playing at a higher difficulty level will usually force you to work out some new tactics because "kill'em all" tactics that work on easy difficulty level will not work out. The higher difficulty level is the more you will need to think before you shoot.
We also have included bonus objectives that are not cruical to completing the mission and progressing in the campaign.

G5 - Red Shark
Missions in Red Shark are challenging and carefully thought-out. More than traditional sim "fly to A kill everything that moves, then fly to B kill everything in sight and get back"-type. It is not simple to develop a random mission builder that would create missions compared to what human mission designer can do, so the game has no mission builder. But, because all mission logic in the game is controlled by Java-like scripts that are stored as simple text files available for editing, the modifications are possible, but this can be done only by a person with at least basic programming skills and probably with our help/documentation.

G5 - Red Shark
No. You are sent to the past, it's WWII -- where do you think you can rearm? The pilot is given some amount of missiles he should use wisely. To make up for it we made the cannon ammo infinite.

G5 - Red Shark
Yes. Any tree, fence, building or structure in the game can be destroyed by helicopter weapons, helicopter itself (crasing into the trees or buildings) and even AI-controlled ground units like tanks fighting with each other and sometimes burning the trees during the battle. The terrain texture is modified real-time to keep spots from the explosions that never fade out. In some missions you can blow up ammo stores that will detonate and the burning splinters will fall onto the forest setting the trees on fire.

G5 - Red Shark
Health bar. When you're hit, the health decreases depending on what weapon hit you. The current level of health has no effect on your helicopter performance until you're out of health. Then the heli falls down burning and the mission is failed. A simple model, but the only working when you need to destroy tens of enemies.

G5 - Red Shark
Remember, the player is sent to the past -- the amount of matter that can be sent by Time Machine is usually limited and the corrections made to the history should be minimal, as always. The player will have no wingmen.

G5 - Red Shark
No.

G5 - Red Shark
Our AI programmer has participated in the development of Ka-50 trainer for military needs several years ago, but this experience didn't bring much into the game. We tried to keep heli characteristics close to the real ones, for example the maximum movement speed is real and the freedom of maneuvers (because of WASD+mouse controls) is quite close to what real pilot of Ka-50 can do, but surely he would need to deal with sophisticated heli physics. The famous "funnel" maneuver of Ka-50 can be used in Red Shark, but, again, it is simple to do with WASD+mouse controls, and would be harder to reproduce with "real" controls. At the same time, there are things Red Shark can do that are unnatural for real helicopters (like instantaneous mouselook rotation), and there are things real Ka-50s can do that are not reproducible in Red Shark (like flying almost vertically and even upside down for a few seconds).

G5 - Red Shark
No wingmen, single-player missions.

G5 - Red Shark
Unfortunately, no multiplayer.

G5 - Red Shark
There are two types of missiles -- guided and unguided, "VIKHR" and "S-8". Aiming with "VIKHR" will require a couple of seconds of keeping the target on the screen to lock. VIKHR is fire-and-forget missile and needs no guiding after you shoot. S-8 flies straight after you shoot and never change direction, but when shot it automatically traces the target's speed vector and distance to it and forestalls the target movement. The same thing about cannon.

G5 - Red Shark
Yes, it probably does, and some people also say Red Shark is similar in the spirit to EA's "Desert\Jungle\Urban Strike". As of Comanche 4 and Red Shark, both games are "shooters in the sky" and are quite far from hardcore simulators. But it seems like we moved even farther to the arcade gameplay -- we had no harcode sim fans to support. Red Shark can be played only from 3rd person perspective, there are no cockpit view nor 1st person view. Controlling Red Shark with joystick is a bad idea, though the joystick is supported.

Besides controls, in Red Shark missions and tasks are probably more diverse, you will surely have to think more in Red Shark, think before you shoot.

The missions in Red Shark include: (this is from the site)

• - Escort your convoys and intercept the enemy ones
• - Lead out the forces from the encirclement
• - Eliminate enemy officers of high rank
• - Defend settlements
• - Destroy enemy parachute landing troops
• - Provide fire support for your forces
• - Destroy enemy strategic objective
• - Fly a lot, shoot a lot