It's not the worst combat flight sim out there, or the best. The missions have a nice logic to them and learning to control your dropship properly takes practice- she's a slippery hippo. The maps are large and have a good sense of scale.

That being said, the graphics are unpolished and ugly, which creates a BIG problem for a flight sim, in that it's hard to gauge distance because the terrain textures are uniformly flat and boring.

The audio is surpisingly good. The com chatter and background music are exceptional.

If the developers had had another few months to touch this game up it might've been an excellent outing. As it is, strategy minded flight-sim enthusiasts only need apply.

This is not a game you want to spend over 10 dollars for, in my opinion.

Dropship: United Peace Force is a fantastic flight combat game that you should try and pick up cheap because it has been out for awhile now. The whole game is fast, competitive, has a steep learning curve with realistic battle sequences, amazing replay functions (cinematic), huge explosions, 20 tough missions, several Vertical Take-Off & Landing (VTL) vehicles, 10 ground assault vehicles (you also play on the ground sometimes driving tanks and other army vehicles), helicopters, 4 different country landscapes (5 missions per level), a coherent plot, futuristic weapons, sky combat, sea combat, land combat and a solid flight interface.

The essence of the game is to drop tanks and vehicles at designated waypoints and then fly around the place targeting the enemy and dog fighting in the sky. Your VTLs range anywhere from full size bombers to light fighter jets for scramble defense. The whole game is set slightly in the future so all the gadgets and planes look really stealthy and sleek.

The actual game play itself is amazing with hyper-realistic controls and a very well done environment. Graphics have got better since this was released on the PS2 but still the game is one of the most enjoyable flight combat games out there and is worth every single penny except for one dismal feature!......

THE IS NO FREE FLIGHT OR MULTIPLAYER MODE!

This brings the game down a star. It would have been simple to do a free flight frag em up or at least a multiplayer dog fight or co-op mode, but no they simply did not give us any at all which is a big shame since the game play was awesome.

4 BIG STARS minus 1 for missing the basics of what a packaged game like this needs. The 20 missions however have a lot of replay value.

Bring on Dropship 2 please soon!

I've been so hooked on this game since I started playing it. I liked Ace Combat 4, but I LOVE this game. Not only do you pilot drop ships, but fighters and land vehicles too. You even get to take a break from flying and driving from time to time to man weapons turrets in the air and on the ground!
The early missions start you out slow, with little or no weaponry. They are a little dull, but they teach you some great piloting skills, so what the heck. No two missions are anything alike. The best thing about this game is that your wingmen AI actually HELP! In some scenarios you can even direct them at specific targets. Another neat feature is that you can view a replay of an entire scenario. I think one of the longest ones was over fourteen minutes. It's the perfect thing when you need to take a break, and you can usually see where those heinous missiles directed at you are coming from! I've seen the friendly AI taking out enemies that were on my tail.
If you like flying games such as Ace Combat, this game is for you. After some flying lessons, you won't be able to put it down.

With most console-based flight games, control schemes are often simplified for the sake of ease. This is not the cade in Dropship, yet it does not damage the gameplay. It feels, in fact, like the controller was built to control the dropship. It's refreshing not to have the simple arcade control. There's nothing like putting the dropship into hover and firing as you descend to the LZ to drop a tank onto the battlefield.

I've played most of BAM!'s PS2 line now: Dropship, Way of the Samurai, and Wipeout Fusion. In every case, the game concept has been interesting/cool, but the actual gameplay and implementation of the ideas just don't deliver a consistenly fun experience.

Dropship's concept is intriguing: pilot a large troop/armor transport around a battlefield to pick up and deliver combat units and occasionally hop into the driver's seat or turret of one of the ground vehicles to carry out a mission. Visions of the dropship/APC units from Aliens were dancing in my head when I picked up this game. Piloting the analogous vehicles in the game did not deliver the experience I expected from the movie. But, to be fair, this game is not supposed to be based on the the movie, so I won't count that against the score. Here's how I got to 3 stars:

+5 Stars for originality: There's no other game that delivers the whole battlefield experience in first-person viewpoint like this one. It's cool to switch from flying to driving to gunnery as part of a mission thread. There are some nice touches like spotting for high-altitude bombardment and dam-busting missions that show the designers put some thought into what battles should be like in the future.

-1.5 Stars for the [bad] handling of all the vehicles: Sure, dropships are huge, lumbering machines that should not zip around like F-16's. Sure, you shouldn't be able to sling an APC around into a bootlegger reverse the way you would in Grand Theft Auto. All this may be "accurate", but it definitely makes for frustrating gameplay. The dropships turn so awkwardly that it's tough just to keep enemy planes in your field of view... much less try to keep the targeting reticle on them for a lock-on. The APCs skid out and crash into things at the drop of a hat. It's as if someone set out to make the perfect simulation of trying to park a minivan in the mall parking lot on a crowded day: you might admire the way [bad]turn radius and screaming kids in the back are "accurately" modeled, but you probably won't want to play for very long.

-0.5 Stars for making it so damn hard to land on a drop zone. This is the central concept of the game, right? Pilot your ship over the landing zone and zip down to release or extract troops? There's a twist: your ship has to be facing in the right direction when it lands. This is indicated by an arrow on the ground inside the blue circle of the drop zone. OK. What's the problem, you say? That arrow is not displayed on your radar, so you can't figure out the orientation until you have a visual on the zone AND the camera angles that the game provides during landing completely obscure your vision of the drop zone 90%of the time. Add to this the tendency of your dropship to skitter uncontrollably during fine maneuvers and you end up cursing a blue streak wrestling your ship to the ground while the drop timer counts down and enemy SAM placements pound you into dust.

So, if you really like the concept and can endure the awkward vehicle handling and cliched, stereotyped voice-acting, then this is a worthy addition to your PS2 library. I stopped having fun about 30% of the way through the missions and went back to playing Ace Combat 4 and GTA3 for my vehicular combat fixes.