Gunboat

Accolade

1988

commercial

English

1988 classic Amiga game - simulators

If not for the movie Apocalypse Now, probably very few people would know that during the Vietnam War Americans had special units to operate on the many of rivers of Vietnam. In Southeast Asia they are important transport routes in areas where there are no or very few roads. Americans used small boats designated as PBR (Patrol Boat, River), but this bureaucratic description may be a bit misleading. Due to their size they were boats, but giving that the crew had a decent protection and the boat was armed with heavy machine guns or grenade launchers, plus radars, basically they were miniature gunboats and the crews soon begun to call them that.

In Gunboat we are put in command of such miniature gunboat. The hardest part is obviously the beginning - you need to master the switching between positions on the boat and dealing with options available on those positions (yes, yes, fortunately, we are not dealing only with directing the boat itself, but we man the guns as well). After that we have to find a way to orientate in countless bends of Vietnamese rivers that we will have to master as well during the missions. The last bit is to learn how to recognize the enemy - behind every corner there is someone waiting to shoot at us and not only with small guns, but also there are civilians that we can’t shoot.

There are various missions available - from intercepting junks transporting weapons for the Vietcong, the destruction of enemy tanks standing on the shore, shooting at targets crossing the bridges to dropping a task force in the designated area. The hard part, however, is the constant sense of danger - behind each bend we can encounter enemy units (infantry, entrenched machine guns, junks, tanks, armored transporters), and you have to enough to respond quickly enough so they could not damage the boat. Of course, you can not be on every post at the same time, so we have also a commands that can be given to the other crew members (f.e. an indication which legs of the river navigator should take next).

The game does not look too impressive, many times it is difficult to identify targets due to poor graphics, but Gunboat is simply a very addictive game. Additionally, thanks to the choice we are given before the battle mission, we can change the equipment on the boat so it would suit our needs. This makes Gunboat a real simulator.

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