This game was one of my fondest memories from the old DOS games days.

You start off as a brand new greenhorn chopper pilot. As you succeed in battle you slowly win medals and your rank increases. As your rank increases you are put in command of other pilots.

Then you can not only make choices of what weapon loadouts and choppers to use for yourself but also their platforms as well. For example you can have one guy in a scout, another in a weapons platform, and then have the other two in blackhawks for rescue missions.

There are three things about this game that I personally absolutely loved and most true war game enthusiasts will love as well, but which may be daunting to a casual gamer or arcade gamer.

The first game mechanic that I loved but which will annoy some gamers is that the game included supply mechanics. What I mean by that is that on any specific mission, and especially in campaigns,
you might not have received a supply of certain weapons platforms or weapons themselves.

Sometimes my favorite chopper would not be available, often times my favorite weapons loadout would have to be modified slightly to accomodate for a given weapon not being available. Due to this you had to learn to make do with what you had, and to learn how to use all of the various weapons and choppers.

The second thing I most enjoyed about this game was that your vehicles took actual component damage and it caused realistic performance degradation. For two quick examples damage to a rotor made it harder to fly, and damage to a weapon made you unable to fire that weapon anymore. This made you play somewhat more defensively instead of just acting like an arcade shooter, where all that matters is not losing that last bit of health bar.

The second thing I loved about the game was when helo's were shot down or ditched. Depending on how far behind enemy lines you were and how hot the area was this could result in anything from a pilot recovery, becoming a POW, becoming a MIA, or becoming a confirmed KIA. This would occur both for your own pilot and for the flight under your leadership.

If the lost pilot was one of your flight you'd be given a replacement but it would not have the medals and usually was not quite as good as the guy you lost. And newer pilots were more likely to be shot down than experienced ones.

If it was your own pilot shot down then his career was over. He'd be listed on the on-duty board as either POW/MIA/KIA and the top pilots would record his achievements.. and then you'd have to start all over again as a brand new pilot.

Yeah, a war simulation where death is actually legit. A shocker right? Of course when DOSBOX came out it did give a do-over option for players who do not like that death experience. Just save a image state before going into a battle then reload to that state and poof the death didn't happen.

But I personally felt that deaths were one of the things which gave that game personality. Further trying to keep my guy and his flights alive became a real goal for me and my flight members almost came alive in my mind as real people if I could keep them around long enough. While the rookies gave me the same sense of being a nameless replacement that real leaders would have.

Overall I really loved this game. But I will admit that there were some issues with it. On the original release there was a couple of game ruining bugs which were later fixed by a patch. Which is one of the reasons I am titling my review as it is. I am not sure whether the version hosted on this site has the patch fix in place or not. But there are a few things I noticed which makes me suspect it is the original unpatched version. Which as mentioned before had some game ruining bugs.

Also the original shipped game only really had a couple of game maps and only 2 campaigns (Europe & Middle East). A separate DLC / addon came out afterwards which added extra campaigns (Arctic & Jungle/Swamp) and extra maps along with a few new weapons and platforms. This again does not seem to be available with this version on the archive.

But the biggest reason why I rate the Gunship 2000 game high, but tell people not to use this browser version is the sound. The original game had sound files that were designed to be played on a certain soundcard which was prevalent during the time the game was released on.

Running this game in DOSBOX allows you to change around the sound so it can emulate that sound perfectly. But, sadly, the version on this site where it uses the browser is not tweaked to make the sound work.

The opening sequence with a chopper was 'supposed' to sound like rotor blades slicing through the air, and on my old DOS computer it was absolutely beautiful to hear. I have played this game emulated before on a dosbox and managed to almost perfectly recreate that sound after a bit of finagling with the sound system emulation.

The browser version here is NOT set right at all and will make a new player to the game wrongly assume that the developers thought that torturing cats would make a good sound track to start the game. And then in the game itself will be constantly besieged by gameplay sounds that are just unnatural and disturbing.

As a reviewer I highly endorse this game to everyone. But I also highly suggest that you find a different copy than this archive has, get your own dosbox emulator, and then personally make the changes to the frequency and soundboard type settings to make it actually sound as intended.

In fact the only reasons I am rating this as a 4 instead of a 5 is that people need to go download their own version (hopefully with the patch and addons applied) rather than using this and then make the modifications for the sound to work right. And I am not entirely sure how easy that will be for the majority of gamers reading this review. So, yes, 4 stars instead of the 5 it deserves at its best.