''Fire Blade'' is a

flight simulation video game A flight simulation video game refers to the simulation of various aspects of flight or the flight environment for purposes other than flight training or aircraft development. A significant community of simulation enthusiasts is supported by ...

released in 2002 by

Kuju Entertainment Kuju Entertainment Ltd. is a British video game developer. The original company was Simis, formed in 1989 and purchased by Eidos Interactive in 1995. Kuju was formed in 1998 in Shalford, Surrey, England, after a management buyout of Simis from Ei ...

. In the game, the player takes control of an advanced

helicopter gunship A gunship is a military aircraft armed with heavy aircraft guns, primarily intended for attacking ground targets either as airstrike or as close air support. In modern usage the term "gunship" refers to fixed-wing aircraft having laterally-mo ...

as a part of the Fire Blade task force, which in the arc of the game's story is responsible for fighting terrorism. The enemies of the game are the United Eastern States, who are believed to be building terrorist training camps and factories for

weapons of mass destruction A weapon of mass destruction (WMD) is a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or any other weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to numerous individuals or cause great damage to artificial structures (e.g., buildings), natura ...

Gameplay

The game is similar in many respects to '' ThunderHawk: Operation Phoenix''. However, in Fire Blade, the player is forced to be far less cautious unless on a stealth mission and is usually pitted against far larger numbers of enemies. The main element of the game is aggressively piloting the player's attack helicopters against large enemy armored formations and completing the main mission objectives, these vary in creativity from simply blowing up a bridge to aiding a special forces team in stopping a train by parking a truck across the tracks and stopping enemy troops from moving it. A secondary element of the game is FPS-style sniping, when the player's helicopter enters "stealth mode" the

autocannon An autocannon, automatic cannon or machine cannon is a fully automatic gun that is capable of rapid-firing large-caliber ( or more) armour-piercing, explosive or incendiary shells, as opposed to the smaller-caliber kinetic projectiles (bull ...

is used as a precision

sniper A sniper is a military/paramilitary marksman who engages targets from positions of concealment or at distances exceeding the target's detection capabilities. Snipers generally have specialized training and are equipped with high-precision r ...

weapon that can be used to accurately target individual soldiers, allowing the player to snipe enemy infantry much like in an FPS. Additional fuel and ammunition for the

helicopter A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forward, backward and laterally. These attributes ...

's jet boosters and heavier armaments are acquired from destroyed enemy vehicles instead of the more conventional reloading areas from games such as the ''Strike'' Series.

Reception

The game received "mixed or average reviews" on all platforms according to the

review aggregation A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services (such as films, books, video games, software, hardware, and cars). This system stores the reviews and uses them for purposes such as supporting a website where users ...

website

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

References

External links

* 2002 video games Combat flight simulators Xbox games GameCube games Helicopter video games Kuju games PlayStation 2 games Midway video games Sniper video games Video games developed in the United Kingdom Multiplayer and single-player video games {{flightsim-videogame-stub