Dropship: United Peace Force

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Dropship: United Peace Force

Developer(s)	Team SOHO
Publisher(s)	Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) Bam! Entertainment
Platform(s)	PlayStation 2
Release date	January 18, 2002 June 12, 2002
Genre(s)	Flight Sim
Mode(s)	Single player
Rating(s)	ELSPA: 11
Media	DVD-ROM

Dropship: United Peace Force is a flight simulator combat game for the PlayStation 2, released in 2002. The player assumes the role of a pilot in the United Peace Force, a fictional multinational military organisation charged with combating terrorism and organized crime across the world.

1 Gameplay
2 Origins
3 Scaling down the project
4 North American Release
5 External links

[edit] Gameplay

The game features a number of futuristic aircraft, including agile fighters, and slower transport aircraft. The game also features levels in which the player drives military vehicles such as armored personnel carriers.

Unlike many science fiction flight simulator games, Dropship is set in the near future, and the vehicles and weapons, although futuristic, are grounded in reality, and bear many recognizable traits of modern military aircraft. The game has missions where the player must fly slow, more vulnerable craft and deliver or pick up valuable cargo. Another feature of the game is the VTOL ability of most of the game's aircraft, allowing the player to switch to a hover mode and land the aircraft manually.

[edit] Origins

After seeing the sci-fi concept of a military dropship being launched from a space platform; for delivering troops and vehicles to any part of a planet so well realised in the movie Aliens, many developers had expressed at interest in creating the experience within a videogame.^{[citation needed]} Joe Money and Nick Ryan were able to get their take on this choice concept greenlighted at SCEE's Camden studio.

[edit] Scaling down the project

The project was first made public in April of 2000, along with a host of other PlayStation 2 titles from SCEE's various studios. From the offset, the title promised a chance to pilot a dropship from planetary orbit, straight down to a combat zone. Pre-rendered images releases at the time pointed to just such an experience.[1] The mock ups also show craft that are far closer to sci-fi spaceships than the designs that would later appear.[2]