A reputation for being able to land helicopters and aircraft in (mostly) one piece rewarded me with a copy of Ka-50 Black Shark earlier this week.

The Black Shark is the Russian alternative to the Apache attack helicopter. An added challenge for the simulation is that it is only a single seat, so you have to fly and fight at the same time.

Installation was nice and simple and I have been impressed with the graphics and performance. I set the resolution to match my gaming notebook (affectionately called ‘The Beast’ thanks to 22in monitor) at 1680x1050. Black Shark exceeded my expectations by playing fine at this rather extreme setting without having to turn anything else down.

I decided to give the training missions a go and it quickly became clear that this is a proper simulation. There is a start button for each of the two engines, but pressing this is just one step of 35! Thankfully there is a quick start-up button if you don’t have a checklist to hand.

Speaking of checklists, there is an impressive amount of documentation available to help play the game. PDFs for my downloaded version of course.

The keyboard shortcuts in both the PDFs and in game have one problem, modifiers such as Shift or Ctrl are listed after the key rather than before as we are normally used to. Given that there is a distinction between the left and right Shift, Ctrl and Alt, this may take some adjustment.

I’ll be back in flight at lunch so there’ll be more detail soon, and hopefully some screengrabs.