Heli Heroes

I went into Heli Heroes expecting a tight little arcade shooter to zone out to for an evening, and what I got was something closer to a museum piece that forgot to put up a "handle with care" sign. This is a vertical scrolling shmup built around two helicopter choices: the AH-64 Apache, which leans harder into machine gun damage, and the KA-50 Hokum, which trades firepower for tougher armor. You pick your bird, scroll forward over 30 missions spanning desert oilfields and snowy Siberian night stages, and shoot everything that registers as hostile, including, reportedly, the palm trees. The core loop has a few mechanical wrinkles that keep it from being total mush. Your guns overheat if you hold the trigger without pause, which forces a rhythm of burst-fire discipline that is genuinely more interesting than it sounds. Fuel drains at a flat rate and your scroll speed is controlled by vertical screen position, so there is a low-key resource tension running underneath all the chaos. You also collect bonuses mid-flight, things like shields, invulnerability windows, afterburners, and a 180-degree screen flip that is as disorienting as it sounds. Boss encounters have a one-hit shield mechanic that punishes chaingun spam and rewards spacing out heavy rocket shots, though once you learn that trick each boss collapses pretty quickly. The campaign mode runs around three to four hours total, and a competition mode sends you through every level on max difficulty for a single high score run, which is honestly where the game has the most replay life. Here is where I have to be straight with you: Heli Heroes has real problems in 2024 that go beyond just being old. Controls are locked with no remapping. Widescreen resolutions crop the picture rather than expand it, so you want to force a 4:3 resolution to see the full intended game area. The Steam user score sits at roughly 46% positive, which is mixed territory, and the criticism is consistent: clunky controls, no aiming precision, repetitive wave design, and some of the most grating pilot voice lines you will hear in any game at any price. The leaderboard system the game was designed around no longer functions properly either, which guts the competition mode's social hook entirely. The one genuine bright spot is local two-player co-op. Sitting next to someone and splitting the screen madness works the way these old arcade titles were always supposed to. It is the scenario the game was built for, and it is the only context where I can picture recommending it without a qualifier. Solo, the repetition sets in well before the credits roll. If you lived through this genre's coin-op era and have someone to drag onto the couch, there is a serviceable hour or two here. If you want a modern shmup with tight controls and meaningful weapon variety, look elsewhere. This one shipped its best years a long time ago. Fred, Scout Team