Dustoff Heli Rescue

This is a blast will purchase it for spending 15-30 minutes killing time but could do with a few more control bindings but that might take the quick fun I had I recommend it

For the sale price of only 50 cents I have to give this a thumbs up because it's definitely worth that, but not full price. The final achievement says "Beat the final mission with them M60 gun" but it actually means the M2 gun. Also after you beat the game it says "More stages coming soon!" but they have already released a sequel a few years ago... so I think that's a lie...

Wow, what a blast from the past. If you ever played Choplifter, you'll recognize this arcade game's play style. It's very similar; you're controlling a helicopter over a battlefield to rescue soldiers. You'll need to be deft at controlling the helicopter, but also know how to fight the enemies in the game and even strategize a bit to improve efficiency and get the most challenging achievements.

The graphics are Minecraft caliber but strangely work just fine, as if you were playing a Lego game. And although this is an arcade game not meant to be realistic, there are actually little bits of realism in the game. You'll fly three different helicopters (Cayuse, Huey, an the CH46) and each does look and handle differently. Each also has different sound effects that make sense and approximate sounds the real helicopters had.

I had a lot of fun with this for several hours and it wasn't expensive.

There are a couple negatives. The controls are kinda weak; they're simple (mainly just two keys) but joystick/controller support would have made it much easier to control. Because of the way the keyboard is situated, I could not comfortably and simultaneously use the keyboard and mouse (enabled for the pro weapons mode) and because of this I relied on the basic weapons mode and that probably reduced my efficiency. Some of the maps have some real cheese like making you fly through caves...you can do it but you'll get frustrated in a few spots too. And I thought the cargo pickup mode in the game was a nice shot of variety, but the cargo physics of the cable-carried loads are loopy as heck.

A couple ideas to make it more fun: I thought there should have been a fourth unlockable craft, like maybe the CH53. Another cool unlockable would have been door gunners or maybe gunship escort. And the cargo lift mode could be combined with the rescue mode by having the user drop a line to pick up soldiers when they're too deep in thick woods.

What is Dustoff ?

A really cool game where you control a helicopter sidescrolling-wise, your missions are simple: rescue soldiers and collect equipments, the game has this really interesting control scheme for the helicopter and you will unlock more helicopters and weaponry as you progress, the games gets really challenging and hard on the final levels too, players who like a challenge will like this one, its a cheap game, if youre looking for some fun, well, give this game a go.

Dustoff Heli Rescue - 9/10
Loads of fun!

What a fun little game, reminesce of the old DOS game Striker and/or Choplifter.
It has basic controls which are intuitive, and you get the feel of the helicopter pretty quick.
There's some interesting maps, that keep things fresh enough for multiple play-throughs.

My 6 year old daughter loves this game too, and is pretty good at it!
The default option to auto-fire works very well here.
You can also rebind the keys which came in helpful, especially if you go for the option of manually firing the weapon instead of having it auto-fire.

My only miniscule gripe is that you have to go back out to the menu settings to change the option, but that is extreme nitpicking and not enough for me to put a bad tick on this Dustoff.

If you feel it's too easy, try setting the controls to "advanced", which makes flying the helicopter very tricky, as with the default option mostly stops you from flipping the helicopter when you hold in "left" or "right".

A complete playthough will take you about 3 hours I reckon, with another hour or two to get all the gold medals, dusto-off tags and achievements.

Highly recommended for a quick fun session, or for the little ones.
I'll be looking into this Dev for more titles :)

Y0kenB

I have to admit that I loved Dustoff Heli Rescue.
It's a helicopter game - and I'm a big fan of that genre, so that was a big plus for me right from the start.
Possibly the best way to describe it would be as a helicopter game crossed with a Rambo movie, and made with Lego (or Minecraft).

The graphics are very simple. There's nothing too flash there, but they've done a lot with it.
It's a side-scrolling game, so all you can do is make the helicopter move left and right, and go up and down (the shooting is done automatically).
The controls are very basic. Essentially, you control the helicopter by moving Left and Right; I would've liked some Up and Down controls, but when you get the feel for the nuances of the Left and Right controls, you can use them to go Up and Down quite easily.

The early levels are quite easy, but it's mega-hard by the time you get to the final level.
There are 25 levels in all, so there's a lot to go through.

Note that, in the first sentence of this review, I said that "I loved Dustoff Heli Rescue" - "loved", as in past tense.
That's because, for me, it doesn't have a high replayability factor.
Once I finished the game, that was it, I really didn't feel like playing it again. I tried to go back to it, but the replayability factor was rather "meh".

However, that being said, I really enjoyed it when I went through all of the levels for the first time.
I went flat-out and got Gold Medals for every level (which was not easy, believe me - especially for the later levels).
When I looked at my achievements for the game (I got 100%), I noted that I got them all within a 23-hour period - I went full-pelt at the game over a period of two days, and got the lot.

In a nutshell: The game design is simple, the enjoyability factor is high, and the replayability factor is low.

If you're up for a simple helicopter game and being a Rambo-style heli pilot, then get this game - it's great, mate!

This game offers some clever / cute voxel / pixel style designs, with great audio design and very simplistic gameplay. The controls of the game consist of left on the keyboard arrow keys or right on the arrow keys. These control which direction your chopper is flying, and alternating between pressing both (simultaneously or not) will affect your height and landing as you drop off rescued infantry or line up your automatically-firing gunfire toward enemy tanks, trucks, and pillboxes.

The sound design of the game is particularly well-done with explosions, rockets, miniguns, and radio chatter all coming through crystal clear while an orchestral, epic-sounding soundtrack makes what's taking place onscreen seem exciting. The game seems to do a decent enough job mixing up the level layout variety, including one where you have to navigate a narrow cavern to emerge from the other side of a hill and rescue stranded infantry, before transporting them back through the cavern and to your home base landing pad, but the missions seem to never break from this repeated formula of 'pick Item X up and drop it off at the base' and it begins to get predictable and kind of tedious quickly with much (all??) of the game's challenges taking place at or near the same general area.

At the end of the day the game is incredibly simplistic and while it functions and delivers mostly what it aims for it's also a title which I can't help but feel like I've already done everything I will be doing throughout the entirety of the game within the first 3 levels. This may fit its 'pick up and play briefly' design, but I found myself getting a bit bored of navigating the same-looking areas to do the same task (pick up infantry and drop them off, or crates in place of infantry) repeatedly. It presents what it does well, but what is present is very simplistic.

It's really fun! For the price i didn't expect much but it really is a enjoyable experience! The graphics are fine, and the gameplay is (mostly) superb! The controls can be very irritating at times, but over time, you will get used to it! for 0.51 its a steal!

This game is very polished, simple and fun to play. Disregard all the negative reviews. Some of us are okay with auto-fire! The game is easy to play, but maybe too easy for some players. Young kid will love it! If you ever liked the old Choplifter game, this is pretty much the same, but with blocky Minecraftish graphics and auto-fire.

I fully recommend this game for nostalgic reasons and because it's fun to play IMO! It's only $4! What do people want these days for 1/2 the price of a meal?

The game runs silky smooth on my MacBook Pro:

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: MacBookPro 11,5 (Mid 2015)
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 16 GB Type: DDR3 Speed: 1600 MHz
Video Card: AMD Radeon R9 M370X, VRAM 2048 MB

Operating System: OS X El Capitan version 10.11.6 (64 bit OS)

Its a fun game, good to pass the time before I head to works and I want to play a game for a few minutes, nothing to involving fun quick easy, nice little casual game. You did good lads very well

I own hundreds of games on Steam, and Dustoff Heli Rescue is one of my all time favorites.

This game is a side scroller that uses an extremely simple control scheme of only two buttons. Left, right (A,D). The twist about this side scroller is that you are a helicopter, and the game is as much about vertical control as it is about horizontal.

To move straight up you hold A and D. To go left, you let go of D. To go right, you let go of A. Feathering these two buttons is how you achieve fine control of the helicopter. After a few minutes it feels pretty natural.

I suggest using manual fire mode, it's more fun than the auto-aim/fire. If you go with manual fire mode you will aim and fire the gun with mouse/mouse1.

My guess is that most negative reviews are from controllers, because I could see the controls for this game feeling less intuitive on a controller. If I was using a controller I think I'd have left and right controls on the triggers and I'd have fire on the stick click/depress so I could shoot while aiming.

Having not watched the trailer, the biggest surprise for me was that the game is played in 2d rather than 3d. That is to say you control the left/right movement and also up/down (altitude) and that's it, meaning no third dimension to roam in. So it's an on-rails shooter where I was expecting more of a simulator, arcadish but still. Since it's also on smartphones though, it makes plenty of sense the gameplay is such.

The game itself is addictive. I was tempted to complete everything in one sitting, that's how much fun I was having. War is depicted in a cartoonish and nonjudgmental vein that I like very much. There are two control schemes available which provide varying amounts of frustration. The achievements are not hard at all. For people seeking additional replay value there is an (entirely optional) set of collectibles. The 3 weapons are quite distinct from each other - each is best suited to a particular situation so the first one can remain relevant even in the final missions. All in all, this was pure casual bliss.

Excellent little game altogether. Dustoff is a simplistic, yet very involved game where you steer a rescue helicopter around authentic looking Vietnam war scenery, picking up stranded troopers and hardware and returning them to base, all the while blazing away at enemy fortifications, boats, and vehicles with your onboard minigun or rockets.
The game is a 2.5D, meaning it's a 3D environment but you can only move to the left or right, and up or down.

The game#s difficulty level is spot on, with a smooth increase in challenge from start to finish, with just one spike early on that settled down afterwards. This was the "heavy rain" level, which seemed to be placed such that just when you thought you had the controls down, it was there to knock you off your pedestal, and despite there not being a single enemy in the level, it proved to be quite frustrating altogether to try to navigate in the heavy wind and rain.

The helicopter has unlimited fuel, meaning you only need concern yourself with its health and ammo levels. You can top these up via health or ammo drops from destroyed enemies, or by returning to base. Which is just as well, as health drops in particular seem in low supply, and you will take a beating from enemy fire, make no mistake about that!

Progression is simplistic, with new helicopters and weaponry being unlocked and made available as you complete missions. Each helicopter unlocks allows you to pickup more troops at once and have increased health. The "handling" level of the helicopters went down as you progressed but to be honest I found the top level helicopter to be the most responsive of them all.

You can't actually kill any of your own guys in the field that you are trying to rescue which means you can blaze away to your heart's content, provided you have enough ammo. This is just as well as they are often to be found in areas of the highest enemy concentration. It did get a little jarring when I was blasting open the wooden cages that some of the guys were locked inwith rockets, but hey, this is a game not a simulation!

The game's controls are based off 2 single buttons, and if done incorrectly, it could have killed the game. Thankfully, they nailed it. While strange at first, it soon becomes instinctive. Left arrow to lift and move to the left, and right arrow to lift and move to the right, and hold both arrow keys to lift maintain your current direction. After a while you'll find yourself tapping away to steady up your chopper to lift some guys out of a river (you can't land in water), or holding both arrows, and easing off on one to get a bit of extra height. It all just works.

Background detail was just excellent, from stray explosions going off, to fellow helicopters going to and fro. The highlight is on the missions where napalm has been deployed, and when you fly over one of the fiery forests, everything dims and you really get a sense of flying through the blackened, smoke-filled air.

The game is quite short and can be completed in a couple of short sessions, but it is well worth the asking price!

8.8/10 – Pixel Graphics Taken to the Next Level!

I always enjoy some good pixel graphics; but this game showed me you can do more with it than I imagined! The gameplay is fluid and action based. You control helicopters moving into the warzone to pick up wounded soldiers, equipment and ammunitions over 25 progressively challenging levels.

There are 4 different helicopters to unlock; the last being that sexy Chinook! Each time you upgrade your helicopter your capacity, armor and guns get better but your overall control greatly diminishes. The music and graphics are both well done and exceeded my expectations; I didn't realize the level of shadows and lighting detail that could be achieved with something like this. I dig it.

It's worth the $4; but definitely grab on sale if this sounds like your thing!

Accidently Reviewed

At first it started fun and relaxing, but when I encountered weather and heavy cargo pickup levels, it just got frustrating. Flying the helicopter steady with cargo and moving it in the direction you want is not easy utlizing only the two acquired buttons the dev provided. It wasn't challenging fun but more of how long can you tolerate the game before giving up and moving to something else. "ApparentlyKId" provides a much more detail of the game in his review, which I agree on. I got it for 49 cents so it wan't a big lost.

Dustoff Heli Rescue has you flying through a war zone trying to save your troops and your equipment. At times you'll need to rescue a certain number of troops somewhere on the map and other times pick up and bring home your equipment such as vehicles. The maps are 3D, retro block style graphics. The graphics actually aren't bad and are handled well in this game. The flight patterns are only up and down vertically and left and right horizontally. There is no real 3D space to fly around in. Some people have complained about the handling of the helicopter. While it's true the controls are very simple and can't be changed, the controls are very simple to get used to and allow you full control of the helicopter at all times. This doesn't mean that the game isn't tricky when controlling your helicopter through tank ammunition, rockets and caves. The difficulty level increases as you progress through your 25 missions, but I never found the game too frustrating or overly difficult at all. Easy 100% achievement if you're into that kind of stuff. Definitely a fun game to play and definitely would recommend it for the right price, $2.50 or less.

I love helicopter games generally. I saw this one a couple of weeks ago and thought it might be ok and added it to my Wishlist. It was on a deep discount today so I dug deeper and read some reviews. I don't know how much they may have updated the game since some of the bad reviews but I was able to turn the music off and also fly with the shoulder buttons on my 360 controller. The aiming can also be set to manual but I didn't have much luck getting any of the remaining 360 buttons or sticks to control the crosshair. So manual control of the crosshair is out for me. I like the game a lot and ran through several missions during my first hour of play. I can now fly 2 of the 3 choppers and have 2 of the 3 guns unlocked. The game is challenging when the wind is blowing hard and I laugh everytime I crash because it was usually my own fault. Overall this is an entertaining game and worth every penny I paid, 59 pennies exactly!

So far I'm enjoying this. Old school Choplifter in a Minecraft setting. Simple aim is to fly helicopter, with very limited controls, and rescue troops and vehicles from enemy territory. You may need to shoot and/or avoid enemies at times as well. Charming with cool physics.

The controls are what will make you love or hate this game. Much like the old Lunar Lander/Thrust/Oids type games, you can only control left thrust, right thrust or both at the same time which makes you feel like you are trying to balance on a bowling ball. I enjoy the challenge, reminds me somewhat of the old Desert Combat Apache controls. But when it gets windy, it becomes extremely challenging to control, especially if you have the controls set to the professional option.

I nice diversion from all the modern popular 3d shooters everywhere, and a game that requires a bit of hand eye coordination.

Great little game. It might be a mobile port, but as long as it's enjoyable to play, and this is definitely the case, I don't care ;)

Been playing for 4 hours, made it to level 16 of 25 (unless there are some bonus levels after that) with (so far) all gold medals and all bonuses (dog tags to find, scattered around the levels). I'm using an xbox360 controller, and that works perfectly (I did not even try with keyboard).

I remained on easy mode for flying (I think pro mode just brings frustration, not what I'm after), and auto fire, though manual fire could be useful on some levels (come to think of it, I don't think I'm able to change that in the options ... so far at least).

The overall feeling of flying is quite good for such a game imho, the levels have been interesting up to now, and the achievements are very doable, for the most part. Only complaint I have : the dog tags bonuses are really difficult to spot sometimes, leading to some wandering around the maps for quite some time, to find the damn last one ;)

The price is right, the game is enjoyable, there are trading cards and achievements : this game is totally recomended, even if it's only 10 hours long or so (I'll know exactly later ...)

UPDATE : game finished in a little more than 7 hours. The last level is a real challenge, don't expect a medal with autofire on (and to clarify, this means you'll have to play this one on keyboard + mouse, controller unplugged, the option to turn off autofire is not available otherwise). So, maybe a bit on the short side, but still very much recommended :)

It's okay. Very simple gameplay, with a little more challenge if you use the advanced controls where your heli can actually tip over, but this thing looks and plays like a mobile port.
Fun for a little while but I won't be spending hours on this.