Comanche: Maximum Overkill / Novalogic 1992 (Roland MT32)
51Comanche: Maximum Overkill was developed by Novalogic and released in 1992 for PC platform.
I remember seeing it for the first time - it was around 1992/1993 when I first witnessed it in motion in some computer store, where its demo was playing on a loop. Being Amiga owner at the time I was accustomed to polygonal 3d graphics running at few FPS, but this rolling terrain with sprite explosions and objects looked unreal running more fluid than any of my Amiga flight sims back then.
The tech behind it was concieved by Kyle Freeman, who had some previous backgreound in medical imaging technologies used in CAT and MRI scanners. It was using voxels to generate realistic looking rolling terrain. Novalogic used this VoxelSpace engine for several other games, constantly improving it (smaller voxels, ability to integrate 3d models etc.). If you're interested in the technicalities of how the rendering works, check out this cool github repo:
https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace
Overall the game wasn't what I expected. After spending some time with it and after the wow-factor weared off, it was clear that this was simple arcade game with not much depth. Missions were simple "kill 'em all" affairs, you could use terrain masking tactics which was cool, but overall the game got boring pretty fast, especially with only 20 missions in the base game. There were additional expansions that added more missions and features, culminating in Comanche CD with 100 missions total divided into 10 campaigns. After playing with it for few days I just got back to Gunship 2000.
The game also had several sequels - Comanche 2 was released alongside Werewolf, where you could pilot the Ka-50 Hokum in single player as well as against other players flying Comanches.
Comanche 3 was by far the best of the bunch, it was built on VoxelSpace 2, which introduced higher resolution graphics and allowed for texture mapped 3d objects. It was most realistic from the series and it is still one of my favorite helo flight sim. Comanche 4 was back to the arcade side of things - it had simplified flight model which was basically best played as FPS game (with WASD layout). It was first Comanche game that didn't used Voxel based engine - it was now fully 3d, with the same engine that was also used in Delta Force: Black Hawk Down. We won't talk about that other Comanche game released later...
More flight sim showcase videos:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIku_oD9y-RD5mg8f9ganyHBOBO8l7lQk