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Heli Heroes

Score: 65%
ESRB: Everyone
Publisher: Zuxxez Entertainment Ag.
Developer: Reality Pump
Media: CD/1
Players: 1 - 2
Genre: Miscellaneous

Graphics & Sound:

Think of any decent RTS (real-time strategy), with it's 2.5D graphics, and you have Heli Heroes. The overhead scrolling view allows you to get a good look at and feel for all of the different elements that you will be bombing. Graphics are as sharp as can be expected, but this comes at a hefty price. Because of the quality of the eye-candy and the amount of it on screen, Heli Heroes gets very, very bogged down at times.

On the flip side, sound effects coming from your machine guns, rockets, and other weaponry fill the screen (and your room) with the pleasing sound of explosion after explosion. Now, if we can only get rid of the annoying guy talking the whole time you play. His stupid little voice-over comments can be humorous at times, but for the most part will be deafening after a while.


Gameplay:

For all of you old schoolers out there, Heli Heroes offers a nostalgic blast to the past a la 1942, Zaxxon, and other flying shoot-em-ups. The concept is simple. You take control of your chopper, destroying everything in your path. Your quest is to complete the 20+ missions, trying to eliminate the threat of the Revolution (this is the bad-guy agency in the world of HH) in an effort to be victorious.

During your time in the air, you'll encounter everything from tanks and jeeps on the ground, to other helicopters and planes in the air. The key to success in Heli Heroes is to continually pick up power-ups. Power-ups range from different types of machine guns, to missiles and laser beams (we spare no expense here). And trust me, you will soon learn the perfect balance of saving or spending your ammo. As you come across mission objectives that require destroying bases and other 'bosses,' you'll need everything you've got or you'll end up in a pile of ashes on the ground.

If it weren't enough for someone to bring back an all but lost genre of games, you can also have a buddy join you in a little two-player cooperative action, just like the arcades! Unfortunately, playing a two-player game adds another major addition of action, which in turn makes the screen's chaos an even bigger headache with even more slowdowns. It's very unfortunate to have a great game like Heli Heroes be brought down because it bogs down as you play.


Difficulty:

There's one thing for sure when playing Heli Heroes, and that is that there is no shortage of action. And with the action comes a certain degree of difficulty. Even with three difficulty settings, the amount of carnage on-screen makes it very fun, and also very hard to distinguish between your shots and those of your opponents. This is actually where the gameplay slowdown is sometimes welcome, so that you have more reaction time to maneuver your chopper. And since this is an arcade shooter, don't expect unlimited continues. Once you are dead, you are dead. You must restart the mission from scratch, or go home.

Game Mechanics:

Controlling you chopper is simple, with only four buttons at your disposal. Two are devoted to cycling through your missile-type weapons, while the other two buttons fire your missiles and machine guns respectively. Making the control even easier, you can actually continually hold down your firing buttons to unleash a huge spray of firepower. Be careful though, as you may run out of your high powered arsenal. I highly recommend the use of a gamepad or joystick, but a game like Heli Heroes is equally playable using the default (or custom) keyboard controls.

Here's the scoop. Heli Heroes is an outstanding one- or two-player game whether you are an old school gamer or a newbee to the genre of over-the-top arcade shooters. Unfortunately, the extreme loss of framerate makes the game almost come to a standstill at times of furious combat, which is when you would hope that a game would run at its best. Because of this, it makes it very hard to give the game the rating I would like to. Possibly, my computer is becoming too much of a dinosaur and can't handle the game very well. But nonetheless, I meet/exceed system requirements and the game should run just as good on my computer as it does on a more powerful system. With that said, Heli Heroes would be a spectacular throw-back game (maybe on a better system), but if you do decide to purchase the game, make sure you have a kick-ass system to play it on.


-Woody, GameVortex Communications
AKA Shane Wodele

Minimum System Requirements:



Pentium MMX 300 MHz (PII 800 MHz recommended); Windows 95/98/ME; 64 (128) MB RAM; 320 (800) MB free hard drive space, DirectX-compatible graphics card; Hardware-acceleration with Direct3D; 4x CD-ROM; mouse/keyboard
 

Test System:



Pentium II 400MHz CPU; Windows 98 SE; 256MB 100MHz SDRAM; Creative's 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 32MB 3D-Accellerator AGP Video Card (nVIDIA geForce 2 chipset); Ensoniq AudioPCI sound card; DirectX 8.0a; using Hewlett Packard CD-Writer Plus 9100 (reads 32x, writes 8x, rewrites 4x) as main CD-ROM; 1 gameport; 2 USB ports; ThrustMaster FireStorm Dual Power Gamepad (USB connection); 56k modem

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Game Vortex :: PSIllustrated