by: Michael Barnes

If the words “Airwolf” and “Blue Thunder” mean anything to you, chances are you’re old enough to remember Dan Gorlin’s Choplifter, one of the great early computer games of the ‘80s. I played it mostly on the Commodore 64, but it was also on pretty much every Reagan-era platform. The gameplay was sort of a take-off on that business in Defender where you pick up the little guys and cart them around. But in Choplifter, the goal was to fly a helicopter into hostile territory in order to rescue hostages while under fire and return them to a base location. It’s an interesting design because it’s not really a side-scrolling shooter as it appears and the high stakes pick-up-and-deliver mechanic creates a fun sense of tension and risk. There were also fun little details, like how you could accidentally land the chopper on top of the hostages while they were waving for you to land.

InExile Entertainment’s newly downloadable Choplifter HD retains just about everything that made the original design a classic. For the first few levels, old hands at the game will be thrilled. I found myself giggling and simply having fun with a good game concept redone with modern graphics and controls. There’s also a great sense of humor to the writing, with the pilots trading off-the-cuff quips such as “this is not a game!” It’s exciting at the outset to see that there’s lots of content, with some 30 levels and even different helicopters with different stats including fuel and passenger capacities. Everything is unlocked based on stars awarded for a couple of different performance metrics in each mission, including whether or not you find this idiot news reporter that can’t stay out of trouble and bring him in from the field.

The missions are all fairly short, so the game retains a light, arcadey feel. It’s perfect for a Friday night fling, but I don’t think it’s something most folks would want to play for the long haul. There’s not enough depth to it even though success requires some thought in terms of planning refueling and repair pitstops during each sortie. More significantly the game gets really hard really quick- and it’s not the rewarding kind of difficulty, it’s the frustrating kind.

Part of the problem is that the game wants you to blow things up. Choplifter was never a shooter, nor was it about engaging in firefights with ground targets and jets. You wanted to avoid those to get your boys home alive. In this edition, fighting is necessary, persistent, and sometimes overwhelming.

The chopper can turn to fire at enemies in the foreground plane, creating a neat 3D effect, but the implementation is sloppy. Battles turn into a confusing mess of whiffing missiles and blind machine gun spray. There are far too many situations where the targeting of your armaments is too uncertain, particularly when soldiers are firing from behind cover, some guy has a lock-on with an RPG, and there’s a jeep blazing away at you all it once.. Neither the controls nor the helicopter are agile or responsive enough to really handle what the game is throwing in your way. Once the jets show up, if you aren’t already bald from pulling your hair out or looking at buying a new controller to replace a broken one you will be.