The spiritual descendant of Thunderhawk.
OAA2 takes the middle ground and follows in the Thunderhawk school of lightweight sims, yet still takes itself seriously enough to avoid gimmicky features such as powerups, experimental weapons or the like. You spend your time flying the AH-64 which can be configured with a handful of authentic weapons loadouts.
Damage is counted towards a generic damage bar but you can also have engine and rotor failures as well as general avionics hiccups making your bird difficult to control. It is quite amusing trying to complete a mission with the tailrotor gone, spinning round and trying to skid the enemy targets into position. If your engines are blown out it is possible to autorotate to a safe landing but you'll still end up restarting the mission and your effort goes unappreciated.
The campaign features 30 missions split up into two arenas. You spend the first half of the game on the Russian tundra stomping out a boilerplate terrorist organization and the remaining fifteen missions kicking their main base in some unspecific Pacific archipelago. Never mind the fact that this terrorist group has military hardware that'd put a large European country to shame, they also somehow managed to grab hold of a string of islands in the much contested Pacific arena. Oh well, campaigns were better in the cold war era...
Missions are to be completed to progress into the campaign, and in a departure from most games of this type nobody is keeping track of the killcount. There is no incentive to go the extra mile; no hit ratios, promotions or even mission scores, which hurts replayability. Successful missions sometimes end right in the middle of a swarm of enemy helicopters, the incoming missile warning audio cue still chirping in your ears.
Some missions assign you wingmen, but they don't amount to much more than a short distraction for the enemy missiles. They act independently so you have the choice of storming in guns blazing hot on their heels trying to keep them covered, or you can just write them off while you continue your NOE tactics.
The average mission takes between five and ten minutes to complete and you get to try out a fairly diverse set of actions. They're mostly of the destroy installations type, although one memorable mission has you flying unarmed into a fortified city landing on a skyscraper roof to rescue a captive.
The game actually lends itself quite well to playing with keyboard, the mouse being reserved for manually targeting the chaingun. You can choose between three difficulty levels as well as arcade and realistic flight, though the realistic mode is forgiving enough for casual pilots to stick to it. Overall OAA2 is a good looking if forgettable sim lite that won't take any helicopter enthusiast much time to complete.
Lastly, be aware that there is a demo floating about the net which although carrying the exact same name and boxshot is a completely different game! That game is also known as Operation Air Assault but is developed by Midas Interactive and features a third person arcade game which allows you to operate and manage a handful of fictious helicopters. In that title you perform tasks and then fly back to the base to reload and repair damage or switch from your assault helicopter to a transport helicopter or vice versa.