Heli Heroes

a arcade shooter with no controller support, It also difficult to get running on modern widows machines.

I keep spamming CTRL and SHIFT and stuff blows up. I bet this was very entertaining back in 2002.

Excellent quarter killer,
very simple retro arcade style shoot em up
You could get lost in the grind, always trying to get better guns and beat the high score

Im first going to go out and say that this game is old, really old. It was launched in 2001 to be exact. If you happen to be born in the 90s and your dad bought you this game, you probably recognize it. I was one of those kids, and I had fun playing it at the time. The helicopter with the shooting effects, rockets, lasers and all of the missions combined with the punchlines and difficulty settings. It was awesome. Now that is has a few years, the graphics and the menu is taking the toll compared to the modern games of today. But it still somehow keeps up, and I can play it for a few minutes per day.

To all of you who do know this game from your childhood, I recommend it because it takes you down a memory lane. If not, maybe you should stay away. I was surprised it was even at the Steam Store in the first place to be honest, lol.

Terrible game, crashes constantly and only once got to even start the game. I'm embarrassed to even own this, but it came in a bundle deal.

Do the right thing and keep your money.

Heli Heroes is a budget title from early 2000s and a vertical shump at that. It doesn't seem to be much, but genres like this one were already viewed as a thing of a past by that time. I could easily mistake it for a Shareware game, expect it isn't.

As it's quite an old game, how does it work? Well... one thing for sure is that it works. You can configure the game, where you can set a resolution. But while you can choose widescreen resolution out of a list, a game wasn't designed for this. What it will do is to cut a portion of screen above and below, so in order to see whole intented game screen, you should set resolution to 4:3 one!
You also can't change controls, and seeing how it uses Shift and Ctrl, you better be careful at button mashing it, unless you want curious Windows to interrupt you. Just hold it carefully.
And yes, the pleasent thing of having to enter your key and of having score leaderboards not work anymore.

At the main menu you can choose whetever you want to Start Game or want do Competition. Competition is like a classic arcade game, or like endurance, or survival... Anyway, you have to play from first mission without continues and saving of sorts, and your score will be written down in highscore leaderboard where you compete with other players for better score if forget that it doesn't work anymore.
Otherwise, you head into simple Start Game, where you can choose mission and difficulty, the missions being unlocked progressively. And you can choose between two helicopters, first one having guy as voice and has more damaging chaingun, while second has female as pilot and has more armor. You probably should go with first one, but then again, you will spam rockets a lot more. Male voice is also more tolerable, and characters speak a lot in this game, somewhat cool and somewhat annoyingly. Yelling to find ejection button upon single hit and saying "take that you terrorist dog" upon shooting down a tree.
And then there is a two-player cooperative mode. But it's a local thing only, hope you got a friend who doesn't mind trying games like this. Didn't get to try it myself. But you can also easily control two players in same time on keyboard, if you want to try something new for fun.

The story is quite simple. You are American. And then there is America's dream enemy, the terroristical group Revolution Now. NOW!! Which has both arabian and russian roots, as well as a bit of alien.
On good side, that means that you will travel through stereotypical deserts and snowy areas too, and I must say, 2000 year lighting looks jolly on the nighty Siberia levels. And yes, it's one of better moments in game, while you listen to the better music out of a very small selection that game has.

So yes, gameplay is your military vertical shooter, not Desert Strike genre, no. It doesn't go too crazy, so it's more simple, just flying forward, sometimes getting to choose direction, shooting down things that shoot back at you and collecting powerups, with only one of them being a negative one (turns screen upside down). Most often you have to do additional mission, that is to destroy something or amount of something. In those cases the direction will loop you around the place. There even once was a single mission in which you had to search for a president from a downed airplane, in which you had to choose what turn to take every few seconds or so, but that's a single case.
Otherwise, you shoot, you make things explode. You collect power-ups to level up your minigun, which you shouldn't use continiously, as it heats up and starts to shoot slower. And you collect all kinds of rockets, whetever lasers or big nuclear bomb, which is hard not to take damage from, and spam it on everything as well.

Oh, and then there are boss battles. You are going to chase some kind of tough airship, which will stay on top of a screen, shooting back at you. It seems to be pretty fine and all tough and great, until you realize one silly thing. Upon getting hit, they activate a one-second or so shield. Thus if you keep on spamming chaingun AND rockets, you will get nowhere. Using strong rockets every few seconds on other hand will give you a victory in each boss encounter quickly, maybe too quickly. Weird concept.

So yes. It's not horrible. It's a small budget game from 2000s. Doesn't bring anything new, does no horrible wrong, gives you action and explosion. Not something I can recommend to anybody, it's still something you can skip on. But it's good enough for what it is.
Sure not as bad as Steam reviews made me belive.

Oh yes, and the non-stop vertical movement in this game will do a weird thing on your eyes. After stopping the game, my eyes kept on moving image vertically slightly for a minute or so. Wacky!

Great game, excelent camera movement, great controller support, works fantastic, fun shooter arcade style good graphics, cheap price :)

The voiceover is so annoying you will want to turn your speakers off. Graphics are LOW end
Otherwise it is an average arcade style shooter

I had my hopes up when I saw this title for a bargain. It gave me a flashback of old classic top-down scrollers that I used to play with my friends as a kid. And this game seemed to have 3D graphics instead of bitmaps -- which in some cases does work out.

With anticipation rising I launched the game, checked the controls and started my flight. The pad controls felt suitable and the chopper felt to respond rather well. First target in sight! Fire! ... "Die, you terrorist dog!" ... WTF? Okay, so the ammo automatically hits the target if you are remotely aiming towards it, I can live with that. And I could even live with below mediocre level design and cloggy textures and below average sound effects. But I cannot tolerate those darn pilot comments every time a target is taken out or you are getting hit! Sure, there's a variety in those but that's pretty much all you hear along side with poorly suiting sound track.

Four training missions was enough for me. There are better games to spend your time with than this. There is a 2 player co-op but I rather have a friend join me for a game of Rayman than Heli Heroes. There's nothing heroic in this game.

Do not buy this, not even on sale. Outdated graphics, I can understand given that it is an old release. What makes it unenjoyable is that the game is more of a rail shooter where you are forced to follow a specific course and if you overshot items to pick up, there is no reversing for it. The sensitivity of speed control is way off and often at times, I find myself crashing into mountain sides, or passing enemies too quickly to clear all of them.

The game is horrible for now... not translated in English, Serious graphic problems. Pls Fix or update.

This is a game I, almost sad to say, looked forward to. It looked decent enough and it was only a couple of bucks (I bought it on sale, by the way). What I got was a rather clunky experience that I only enjoyed with a friend, but not alone. I'll list out my problems below:

Controls: For the most part, the controls responded to my inputs. For some reason, my controls gave out on the third tutorial. It seems as though control of your helicopter freaks out sporadically. However, those times are few and far between, so the controls are alright at best in my opinion.

Game Play: Lackluster. There is no real sense of where you're supposed to aim at the enemies and overall it seems like the one thing I look for in a game, bores me to death. Also, the helicopters you get to chooses from don't even feel different in the slightest.

Powerups: I add this because when an arcade game comes along, there is bound to be powerups found. However, most of the time, I don't know what they do. Some are self-explanitory, but other don't make any sense. If there was a system that told me or at least some kind of instruction, I would be fine with it.

Voice Acting: This is one part of the game I like solely for the reason it sounds like early PS1 english voice dubbing.

Soundtrack: Forgettable. Sometimes non-exsistent.

3/10. This game is a lackluster experience unless you have a friend along. If this was a comepletely single-player experience, it would score lower. All in all, do NOT buy this game.

Wow...what a sad game. I was thinking it would be something different. The controls from the keyboard are awkward and awful. The voice acting was equally terrible. Not even unique at all!! I would NOT recommend this game at all!!!

Hope you love entering registration codes, because that's what you'll do over and over and over and over... Obviously, this slumlord publisher doesn't even believe it when you enter the registration code you get when you bought the game!

I wanted to like this game, I really did, but this piece of "Topware garbage" (ok, that's redundant) just won't let me! My first and biggest red flag should have been it was from Topware, a company which should change its name to something more appropriate, like "Crapware", "Shovelware", or "Nagware".

Once the game started (after the DX installs), the first thing I was presented with was the serial code registration screen. Upon entering the serial code, I promptly went to the "Options" area to check / change whatever, and upon backing out to what should have been the main screen, I was once again presented with the registration screen. Upon entering the code AGAIN, I then exited the game, thinking that perhaps shutting it down would save the registration code...

HOW WRONG I WAS!

After starting the game back up, I was finally greeted with a proper title screen & menu. I decided to begin the tutorial in order to find out the specifics of this game which I thought would be a nice homage to the scrolling shooters of old (Choplifter, Raiden, Sky Soldiers, Dodonpachi, etc...). Once the mission started, I was instructed to move from A to B and shoot targets for extra points. This is when I found out the only thing on my XBOX 360 wired controller the game recognized was my joystick, so I spent the entirety of the mission moving around on-screen, collecting power-ups / ammo, targeting things, and not able to shoot them. Once I "completed" the first tutorial mission, I decided to exit back to the title screen so I could check my control configuration...

AND ONCE AGAIN GOT THE REGISTRATION CODE ENTRY SCREEN!

It is at this point I gave up and rejoice that I only spent a buck or so on this lesson in terrible coding and Topware "quality".

Don't buy this. Just... don't. Get MAME instead.

I love me some arcade shooters, in all their campy gloriousness, but this one was not fun for me. I'm pretty forgiving of this genre, but this one has some flaws that annoyed the crap out of me. It has terrible overused one-liners and non-intuitive level navigation. I'm ok with one-liners, but when you have one for EVERY single defeated enemy, and random map desstructible, then it gets really old. Especially when you light up a grove of trees, and then you hear, "Die terrorists!" and 9 other equally engrossing one liners. Even some of the training levels were tough to navigate. One such level required that you defeat all enemies, but took me about 30 minutes of trial and error to reach some obscure corner to destroy some benign weapons cache to win. Overall, the graphics are decent, but gameplay has some flaws. If they fixed these quirks I'd say it still remains a mediocre shooter.

This is not at all what I was expecting. I thought it would be more like Desert Strike on the SNES/PS. Controls and gameplay were not very enjoyable. Graphics settings also didn't stick so it was playing at an extremely low resolution.

It's a rail based shooter that you control the speed at which you advance, but don't the ability to stop and shoot, or aim very well at a particular target. Not to be snide, but arcade games 15 years ago played a lot better, and looked better.

Worst game I've ever bought. Thought it might be like those old helicopter games (desert strike etc), turned out to be nothing like them. Linear, repetitive, unimaginative and boring gameplay with so few features you are left in awe of how terrible it is. If you are looking for a soulcrushing in depth experience of how bad a game can turn out, buy this game, if not, don't waste your money. Bought it on sale for near nothing, still not worth it. Bleh.

I can't remember buying this, but apparantly I must have thought it looked cool like a SNES game. I just tried it and for $2.50 it's not worth even that because it's an incredibly linear rail shooter and where you fly depends on which way the camera turns. It's incredibly crappy. But it's fun for maybe fifteen minutes. Which can also be said about Josh Holmes mother. But I'm not saying anything that everyone doesn't already know.

A waste of £2 - I should have read up a little more on this before I bought it. I thought I was getting an old school Desert Strike clone - what I actually got was more like a really really old school River Raid. Damn you nostalgia! Oh well. I guess it's ok if you want a vertically scrolling old school shooter, but not so good if you felt like a bit of free roaming isometric shooting action.

Embarassingly shit. So shit I bought a copy for someone else just so I didn't have to be the only cock in the world with a copy. Voice acting would look out of place and ostentatious in a Chuck Norris film.