What makes Team Alligator different from most simulations is the crew management. Active during the two campaigns, it's a valiant effort to add facets to the often near-sighted treatment of war in PC simulations. The player begins each campaign with a squadron of six helicopters plus pilots and a maintenance crew. Your job is to determine how many helicopters to send on missions, select crew assignments, and keep maintenance teams at work on damaged aircraft. If you fly perfectly, never need repairs, rotate the pilots around the clock, and can win missions with only half the squadron, then you'll never have problems. But lose a few helicopters, push the men too hard, or start losing battles, and you'll have to contend with fatigued or demoralized pilots or have to rely on damaged helicopters. Making your life even more complicated is the human factor. One pilot may not be happy with the co-pilot you've paired him with, and this can damage his morale, or result in poor performance.

All this seems realistic, and it's a nice break from combat action, but some of these management tasks often materialize as gimmicks rather than meaty gameplay features. Morale, for example, can be improved by giving American candy bars or granting visits to a brothel. This is a humorous detail, but most of the human factors don't seem right. I had a rough time in the beginning of one campaign, and lost three helicopters. Team Alligator does a nice job of throwing in the occasional context-sensitive dynamic mission, and I successfully rescued the downed aircrews. But still team morale sank despite my eventual improvement in mission performance. In addition, filling crew billets in three helicopters should have been easy with the whole squad of men to choose from.