Choplifter HD Review

Choplifter, the Apple II original, is still remarkably playable despite being 30 years old this year. Something to do with its uncomplicated control system and clearly defined goals no doubt, but there’s oodles of charm too.

Having ripped through several screens of flack-spewing turrets and men with guns, we were always careful to clear the area before touching our chopper down to pick up our precious human cargo, individually represented by a handful of pixels that wiggled onboard in two frames of animation.

Then came the hard part, the helicopter equivalent of tiptoeing back to base, balancing the tentative need to avoid being blown out of the sky against a fuel gauge that burned out faster than a space shuttle rocket booster. 

Any attempt to bring that basic concept up to date would probably have ruined the experience altogether, but inXile has treated this remake exactly as it deserves.

Graphically, it’s been brought in line with contemporary XBLA games with a sprinkling of new features like Achievements, an online leaderboard and a five-star rating system that can unlock new choppers with better armour, weapons, fuel capacity and other stats.

There’s also a new dimension (literally) that inXile has brought to the classic: the shoulder buttons turn the chopper perpendicular to the horizontal direction of travel so that it is facing the screen. You can’t move along that plane, but enemies will often pop up and attack in the foreground, so this is the only way of killing them.

Buildings in the foreground are choice locations for an rocket-propelled grenade attack.

While Choplifter is a reasonably skilled shoot-’em-up, it doesn’t require much co-ordination, so dealing with a third dimension and the corresponding controls required is well within the ability of the average gamer.

There are small differences to gameplay, and only on some levels. A vanilla mission might require players pick up civilians, UN employees and wounded soldiers and take them back to base, but there are more interesting objectives thrown in to keep things varied.

Each mission comes with a hidden objective that is left for players to discover, like rescuing reporters stranded on top of a building you pass on the way to a hotspot indicated on the mini map.

Sometimes there are no rescues, just an attack mission to take out anti-aircraft installations and other targets. There’s even a nod to the current pop culture resurgence of zombies, by devoting an entire level to the undead, which spawn in their dozens along the ground and rush towards the hostages as you attempt a rescue.

Choplifter HD is a bit more than a novelty. That is to say, it has more longevity in it than a nostalgia-fest that might have had less effort put into it, but cracks begin to show in the HD veneer after a few hours – and this will be long before perfectionists will be able to five-star every mission and score all the Achievements available. It’s a fun download, but the 1,200-point asking price for it is a bit steep.