I used to play a lot of Gunship 2000 on the Amiga and in my opinion, there hasn’t been a decent heli-combat game for a good while. Developer and publisher Klabater are having a go at the long-forgotten genre with Heliborne.

“Rotary-wing aviation and helicopter combat with a dynamic battlefield and the support of ground forces. Appreciated for MMO elements and an addictive gameplay loop. Use tactics and make strategic decisions or fly around and shoot in historically accurate maps.”

Originally released back in 2017, Heliborne now hits current-gen consoles as a swanky new version with various enhancements… apparently. I say “apparently” because if this version has been enhanced, then the previous version must’ve been utterly unplayable. Right from the off, this game has one of my biggest bug-bears, tiny font. So many devs use a minuscule font (usually when porting a game from PC to console) and this game is no different. On top of the tiny font, the menus themselves are horrendously designed, really difficult to understand, horribly convoluted and just an absolute mess.

Heliborne is largely an online experience with you teaming up to play multi-player deathmatch-type games… I think. I can’t tell you for sure because I couldn’t get into an online game as nobody else seems to be playing this. After about an hour of trying to get into multiple online games and failing, I gave up. Thankfully, there is an offline/single-player mode… or perhaps not thankfully because Heliborne is a terrible game. Just from the visuals alone and before you even control one of the helicopters, the graphics look like they are from about two generations ago. Even for a small indie game, the visuals are awful. Really short draw distances and massive amounts of pop-up. A quick reminder that this is ‘enhanced’ for the current-gen.

Then, I also noted that the basic controls are backwards. You hold the left trigger to take the heli up and the right to take it down. No, this is ass-backwards, as anyone who has ever played any vehicle-based game will tell you. The right trigger is always accelerate/up and the left is always brake/down. Hey, just change the controls in the options, great idea… except that you can’t rebind the controls. Even more so, there is no tutorial to get you used to the basics, the game just starts and you’re fully expected to know exactly how to fly these helicopters from the off. After a bit of faffing about I got used to the basics and, it’s kind of hard to explain but, the copters fly terribly. Have you ever played a driving game where the cars feel like they are constantly driving on ice? That is what this game makes the helicopters feel like. Look, I understand inertia and everything and I know that helicopters don’t control anything like a car, but even so, these things do not feel right when you fly them.

I have to be honest and tell you that after a couple of hours of flying around, trying to work out how to play this with no tutorial, really crappy menus and the tiny font that’s pretty much impossible to read, I just got really frustrated and turned it off. When I end my reviews, I always look at the price of the game to tell you if it is worth it. I don’t care how much Heliborne costs, even for free, it’s not worth it. I got my review code for free, and I think I should probably request a refund for that. It really is a damn shame too because I’d love a good heli-combat game in the vein of the awesome Gunship 2000… which was released in 1991 and still far superior to this game in every way. On paper, Heliborne sounds great, with dozens of copters from the 1950s onwards, exciting combat and more, but it is a title that is vastly underdeveloped and feels like the game has not even been finished (again, originally released in 2017). Avoid.