Helgoland Review

Sometimes a little gem comes along which you’d never expect. I’d never heard of Helgoland before, never mind tried to look for any scenery depicting it, but Aerosoft changed that for me.

As the Aerosoft site states: “Helgoland consists of two small islands on Germany’s northern coast. It has a rich and varied history but they might still be unknown to many people. Don’t let this distract you from taking a look at this scenery because you will see some things you have not yet seen before. In this way this scenery is a lot like Lukla - Mt Everest (done by the same developer) that many people bought to see what was possible at that time.”.

Now, this is a tiny scenery, but you’re going to be amazed by how life-like it is. I don’t think I’ve ever flown in any scenery area with such realism in any product. It is priced at 19.95 Euros, which may seem a tad expensive for 2 small islands, but don’t let that put you off. You’re going to spend a lot of time with this scenery.

Included are 2 “missions“, the first being a short sight seeing tour of the island and the second being a rescue mission. The missions are provided with custom radio “chatter”, adding yet another level of realism (and humour ) to the package.

This is a list of features as taken from the Aerosoft site:

• Extremely detailed scenery (all buildings)
• 1 meter resolution mesh (so you see the smallest dunes near the airport)
• Very good performance in FSX (most testers reported solid 20+ fps on Intel Duo2core CPU’s)
• Missions included (one to get to know the island, one to test your flying skills…and more to come!)
• Animated sea gulls (better not hit those!)
• Sounds linked to scenery objects (waves, bird, ships and even the sounds of the church bells at noon)
• Extensive shipping traffic (on nearby shipping lane and most regular scheduled ship traffic to and from the islands and oil rig)
• Helgoland-Düne airfield (with extremely short runways)
• SAR helicopter base of the German Navy (start of your rescue mission)
• Mittleplatte oilrig (highly detailed)
• German Navy frigate (moving and landable)
• July 2006 aerial images (so fully up to date)
• Extensive manual (German and English available)
• Night and seasonal textures and effects
• Underwater structures

System requirements

Microsoft Flight Simulator X (NOT compatible with older versions)
Win XP(SP2), Vista
Pentium 2 GHz
512 MB RAM ( 1Gb strongly advised)
Sound card
Adobe Acrobat® Reader 6 minimal to read and print the manual (1)
Download-Size: 42 MB
Installations-Size: 68 MB

I tried the scenery with a machine with a 2Ghz Centrino processor with 1Gb RAM, a 256Mb nVidia 7800 graphics card and around 200Gb free space on my FSX install directory. I modified my FSX configuration as per the manual provided with Helgoland and noticed an approximate 10% - 15% drop in frame rates compared to the default scenery, which is very impressive given the amount of detail provided.

Conclusion

This is a necessarily short review as, to be frank, there is not a huge amount of content to review! However, it is of such outstanding quality, that I must recommend it to anyone seeking the (currently) ultimate in realism possible with Flight Simulator X. I’ll let the screenshots speak for themselves. Head over to the product page for Helgoland for more and be prepared to be amazed by yet another exceptional Aerosoft product. I think the best single word to describe Helgoland is immersive. It really does feel like you’re there.

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Technorati Tags: flight simulator x, helgoland, scenery, aerosoft

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