PC: Elite Helidefender

Ratings

Graphics:7.00 [Bar of Width 70]
Sound:8.00 [Bar of Width 80]
Gameplay:6.50 [Bar of Width 65]
Replays:5.00 [Bar of Width 50]

Our Take

Helicopter games used to be all the rage back a few years ago, but started to die off a little while back. But thanks to a couple titles, the genre is seeing a revival and is beginning to thrive again. Gamers have seen some stellar helicopter themed titles and some pretty bad ones. So where does Team6’s game Elite Helidefender come in? The game itself may not be stellar, but it’s certainly not bad for a budget title.

The game looks pretty good, although the environments are a bit bland. Your helicopter is fairly detailed, as are the enemies you take on. Also, explosion and particle effects are used to the maximum effect, and they certainly look great. However, system requirements aren’t all too heavy, so even if you have to downgrade the effects a little, people with different computers should be able to play. And there is no noticeable slowdown, even with a huge amount of things going on at a time (enemies will swarm you and be all over the game world). There’s only one downside (and this was mentioned a little earlier), the environments. It’s basically one big desert area with cities and other obstacles scattered about.

Elite Helidefender has some excellent soundwork. If there’s one thing you’ll notice, it’s that Team6’s games all have excellent background music and sound effects. Background music in this game is more up-tempo and has a generic rock feel to it, but it will never get on your nerves. And explosions sound great; it feels like some effort has truly been put into this area of the game.

Gameplay is fairly simple, essentially you do two things, protect city buildings and destroy enemies. Usually your goal involves protecting the city for a certain amount of time, and then destroying enough enemies to accumulate the points necessary to move on. There are no levels in Elite Helidefender, everything is free roaming. You are assigned missions on the fly. If you die, you lose points and continue. This is a nice setup, and does separate the game from others in the genre.

Control is straightforward, you maneuver using the arrow keys and shoot using the right and left mouse buttons. Guns on your copter have to recharge after being used a lot, so it’s better to actually try and aim at targets rather than to shoot mindlessly. Radar is helpful, and for the most part your lock-on is fairly accurate. However, the game is still pretty difficult. Even on Easy difficulty, so many enemies will swarm you that it can be hard to keep track of where they all are. It’s not impossible, but expect to take a beating your first few times.

There are a few other issues with the game. The main one would be that there are only two different copters in the game. While they do have their differences (and it is noticeable), once you’ve played with both of them for awhile that’s about it. The game’s free-roaming nature is nice though. Although there isn’t necessarily a lot to this title, it is a decent budget title so take that as you will. You could certainly do much worse.

http://www.team6-games.com/

Overall Rating: 6.75

Chris Dahlberg
September 20, 2005