Review - Choplifter HD

Thirty years is a long time. Choplifter first hit the Apple II back in '82 and although it's been a while since the last sequel, it's about time the poor old chopper stopped being a bad guy. Just look at Blood on the Sand: every single boss in the dumb game was a bloody helicopter. Choppers are meant to be a force for good, rescuing civilians and injured soldiers from combat zones, not hovering around waiting to eat a banquet of rockets from every buzzcut soldier lucky enough to grace the boxart of a modern military shooter.

Choplifter HD is almost everything a reboot and remake should be, give or take some shonky aesthetic failings, poor humour and a rough difficulty curve. The idea is as neat as it's always been: pick up and rescue civvies and soldiers in dangerous combat zones, dodging AA fire, missiles and fighting against the clock to return the injured before they bleed out. As it's always been, inXile's reboot plays out on a 2D plane like Dan Gorlin's original, but with the addition of a .5D to the visuals and action that flits between the foreground and background.



The relatively simple controls – using the right stick to aim, bumpers to flip between fore and background and all the face button to use up fuel for a boost – become trickier and trickier to master the deeper into the gamer you get. After the sedate training missions introduce the basics of flight, rescue, refuelling and controlling your rate of fire, the skies you navigate back and forth between slowly become more chaotic than just a few AK rounds bouncing off the underside of your chopper. Homing missiles need to be either shot down, boosted away from or led into the scenery, AA flak chews you up and slows you down if you fly into it, cranes and bridges can be smacked into (and even knock passengers out of your heli) and eventually, the skies will be filled with jets.

The thing about Choplifter is that it gets hard faster than a teenager finding his first copy of Razzle in the woods. Thankfully though, it manages to make the challenge bearable thanks to a neat balance of weighty, manageable controls, patterns to learn how to deal with and a steady upgrade stream for each of the three main chopper types. Each of the thirty or so missions spread across the three campaigns can give you up to five stars, with the more you play giving you better equipment to go back and master earlier levels. It's just about pitched perfectly, frustrating you with increasing challenges at the high end but tempting you to go back and score higher, thus opening up better aircraft to deal with the problems ahead.



It's still not easy though and the AI on the ground doesn't want to do anything to give you an easier time. Injured pick-ups require a long time to board after you carefully land, during which time enemy troops might show up on either side or from the foreground, forcing you to either get out quick, risk taking the hit or quickly re-adjust so you can get off a few carefully aimed rounds. It's not made easier by civvies who actively try to get directly underneath you as you try to land, or ignore you because you landed a tad too far away from their catchment zone. Sometimes they'll just straight up wander into your rotors or spend forever wandering around picking which side to board on.

Dealing with enemies, incoming fire and time and fuel limits becomes an even greater concern during Escape missions, which see you load up with evacuees and try to make a run from behind enemy lines, with your limited fuel and no ability to head back to a safe zone to repair forcing you to keep moving at a steady pace. And yet as frustrating as it gets, going back and trying again doesn't make you hurl your controller across the room: it just makes you want to try and try again, to get back without losing and personnel and nabbing those five stars. Working out when to refuel, which enemies to ignore and whether to pick up the 'hidden' journalist on every level becomes a compulsion, not a chore.



For the most part the visuals do a decent job of living up to the HD part of the name, although the decision to zoom in on the poor character models when you drop off survivors doesn't do the game any favours. There's a decent variety to the environments and even the inclusion of random zombie-based missions isn't as terrible as you might expect; they almost feel a little unnecessary, until you have to shake around your chopper to detach strays that want to get to the juicy brains you're trying to save within.

Much less welcome are the lame attempts at humour – the oddly detached pilots and gunners spouting bored clichés and weakly delivered one-liners is bad enough, but such comments really only add to the noticeable lack of background music. Sound isn't great all round, but against the strength of the high score action and navigating the airborne battlefield mazes. It's like the end, like Saigon all over again: it's hell on Earth, and it's pretty bloody cool.