No, it was fucking horrible lol
Not at all! The game was a technical mess on a wide variety of levels but the gameplay itself was actually pretty entertaining!
I was "late to the party" on this thing since I played it in around 2001 and after suffering through the horrible graphics and shit-tier polish, I found a game that could only be described as "Super Crazy Taxi". Later levels consisted of this careful balance of controlled chaos as you strung together various missions. The genius in the mini-mission design is that it frequently involved two steps: picking something up and dropping something off. So you would pick up a passenger for transport on your way to transporting ill people to the hospital. You'd smash you copter into a reckless driver (hilariously the fastest way to get them to stop is to crash their car) in between re-filling your water tank at the lake and using said water to put out a fire.
You'd do missions within missions, juggling several at a time, while the timers for failing missions and cash/point penalties quickly accruing in the later levels. You used that cash to buy better copters that handled considerably better, took up more passengers, had higher-capacity water tanks, etc. and each of the new copters really did feel like totally new, significantly different copters. The sense of progression was surprisingly pretty steady in making you feel like you were always working toward some part for your copter or an entirely new one.
Everyone talks about the "gay parade" easter egg but the game was chock full of weird shit. The Apache fighter copter was there and actually let you wreak havoc on everything. One of the late-game "enemies" in the game is a UFO that just flies around zapping shit and starting fires/hurting people, and the Apache is the only way to shoot down what is otherwise an invulnerable enemy. It takes so long to do it that it's not actually a feasible way to complete the level (not to mention there's only one map in the original campaign IIRC that even has the Apache in a military base without cheat codes, you acquire the Apache in any other way other than physically knowing where it is and flying there), meaning shooting down UFOs was, more than anything, just an easter egg. Other weird shit included a cheat code that turned you into a dog and made you run extremely fast. And there's actually a way to nuke the entire map by shooting missiles at a Nuclear Power plant. Destroys most of the surrounding area and, since the game is coded like shit, hilariously ends up crashing the game itself almost always. You're truly nuking the game lmao
SimCopter is fucking weird, and a mess, but a ton of fun with really bizarre easter eggs but the actual gameplay mechanics were surprisingly very well done. Haven't really seen that style of gameplay ever again in a game. The problem is the starter copter flies like garbage (intentionally) and the game itself is already a technical dumpster fire that I (and by extension I assume many others) simply thought the gameplay mechanics in the game were awful as well. It made a terrible first impression by having a rickety piece of shit of a copter as your starting one, giving the false impression that the flying mechanics of the copters were terrible even though they were pretty good for their time and had a pretty decent skill ceiling. Expertly maneuvering advanced copters to rapidly pick up and drop off people, graze by reckless drivers, and getting good at aiming and shooting water to put out fires made for some really fun minute-to-minute gameplay.
I unironically really like SimCopter and I think the fact that it was such a giant technical mess made it all the weirder/more charming.
