This was published in 1997 by Prima. Anyone who has read much of this blog will know my feelings on flight sims but it’s still scanned in for anyone who wants it with all the other downloads.
The Jane’s games don’t hold much interest for me so I’ve briefly skimmed through this one. A lot of the early content with short tips on the game is straight out of the Longbow 1 guide. As you would expect the same advice applies in both games. There are some new sections to cover the extra helicopters that were added to the sequel and also the multiplayer elements of the game.
There is a long “Attack Helicopter Operations” section which is an abbreviated version of a US army field manual. Some of this is relevant to playing the game, other aspects are just background detail. Reading army field manuals isn’t my idea of fun so I skipped most of this.
The campaign walkthroughs are replaced by some general tips since there is no static campaign in Longbow 2 thanks to the dynamic battlefield system it adopted. There were a set of one off missions though which I never actually looked at myself when I was playing the game. These do get the full walkthrough treatment with tips on how to play each and every one of them.
The last section of the guide is filled with Jane’s Sentinel biographies on the political and military histories of the countries in the game for anyone who wants to know who they are blowing up.
The manual also comes with a pull-out map of Azerbaijan, which doesn’t strike me as especially useful but I suppose could be used for planning routes if you want to fly down valleys all the way. I do get the impression that all these Prima guides had to come with some sort of pull-out as a sales gimmick of sorts.
Without the campaign walkthrough, this book appears to me to be less useful than it’s equivalent from Longbow 1. It can offer plenty of good advice but ultimately you have to figure things out for yourself. It fills an awful lot of its pages with background details from Jane’s and the field manual instead. These didn’t interest me especially but will probably hold more appeal to Longbow 1/2 fans.