Apache Flight is a vertical scrolling shoot 'em up that looks like SWIV. The game was released only for the Atari ST and Amiga home computers in 1992 by Atlantis Software.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY We are towards the end of the Cold War between the USA and the USSR. In the Eastern Europe countries communism was replaced by democracy and all the governments decided to leave nuclear holocausts behind, signing disarmament treaties and getting rid of their stockpiles of nuclear warheads. But all this seemed not enough to protect the world, since some of these weapons have ultimately fallen into the hands of a terrorist organization from an unknown country. Your mission, as an Apache AH-64 pilot, is to find the terrorists, destroy their weapon hangars and prevent potential mass destruction of the planet. During your flight you collect several bonuses by shooting down enemies and increasing your weaponry and health. The game is a classic top down, vertical scrolling shoot 'em up with plenty of enemies to shoot down (either airborne or on the ground). Your main weapons are your cannon (by pressing the fire button rapidly) and rockets (by keeping the fire button pressed). The game is tough and its difficulty would probably make you quit soon. To tell you the truth, I expected more, but again, this game is good and it will not leave you disappointed. Apache Flight looks (and plays) pretty much like the SWIV (Silkworm IV) game.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The Amiga version features good visuals and quite smooth sprite animation and screen scrolling. OK, don't expect a state-of-the-art Amiga game! Apache Flight features some nicely done war choppers, battle tanks and terrains. Note that the Amiga version has up to 16 colors on screen and looks like a direct port from the ST version. Sonically, we have some mediocre, sampled sound effects like explosions, missile fodders and gunfire but nothing really special. There is also a nice introductory tune but no in-game music at all.
CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHz MEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM. GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once). SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs