Comanche: Maximum Overkill

Comanche: Maximum Overkill was a technical sensation in 1992. While the competition built its worlds from crude polygons, here the terrain was rendered with voxel technology, giving it genuine hills, canyons, rock towers, and smooth transitions. The player takes the seat of an RAH-66 Comanche attack helicopter and flies low over the ground, where the terrain shields them from radar and gunfire alike, and it's precisely this valley-hugging flight that makes the game what it is.

The gameplay sits somewhere between simulator and action game. The helicopter handles fairly directly, but the player has to manage ammunition, switch between the cannon, unguided rockets, and anti-tank missiles, and above all choose the order of targets. Missions feature tanks, anti-aircraft systems, enemy helicopters, and ground installations, and typically require hitting several targets and making it back safely. The rotor sound and onboard-system callouts keep the tension up, and even though the graphics look crude today, at the time they produced an effect polygon games simply couldn't offer. That spectacle came at a price in performance, though — the game was among the titles that could bring even a decent computer to its knees.

At the time, Comanche was received as a showcase of where computer graphics were heading, and it launched a whole series of sequels and expansion packs. The voxel approach ultimately lost out to accelerated polygons, but in the early nineties it showed that terrain could be rendered more organically than the engines of the day were capable of. Today the game feels simple and the missions repeat after a while, but flying just above the surface of a dam or between rock walls still has its charm and recalls a time when technical innovation alone could sell a game. Alongside the main campaign, the title also offers quick missions and a difficulty choice, so you can sit down with it for twenty minutes. That combination of instant action and then-unheard-of scenery is why plenty of players still remember Comanche as one of the experiences that convinced them of the power of the PC.