Humanitarian Helicopter

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

.

Review:

Humanitarian Helicopter is an Arcade-style game released on the Wii U in 2016. Originally launched at a price point of $10, in 2017 the game became free-to-play. This is a game that has players flying a helicopter on 2D levels, dropping supplies to houses and rescuing people in distress.

The presentation here is awful and amateurish. This feels like someone’s first attempt at making a game, with ugly, poorly-slapped-together 2D visuals and a repetitive soundtrack. This is made worse by an absolutely atrocious menu screen with tiny text.

In fact, I have to take a moment to talk about the menus in this game because they are particularly bad. It’s not just the text so small you can’t read it on the Wii U gamepad, it’s not just the laughable spelling errors throughout all of it, it’s also the fact that you cannot navigate menus in this game by any means other than the touchscreen, for absolutely no good reason – the gameplay doesn’t use the touchscreen at all. And yet, despite chaining the player to using the touchscreen and forcing them to look back and forth between that and their TV (where they can actually read the screen), these buttons are extremely tiny, making it a chore to even press them without making use of the stylus.

This would still be a pretty terrible issue if this was a port from PC or mobile devices where these menu issues were a holdover from another platform. However, as far as I can tell, this game is a Wii U exclusive, which just makes me wonder why the game’s creator would create menus so terribly broken and ill-suited to both the platform and the game it is for.

As for the game itself, Humanitarian Helicopter is extremely simple. Just fly your helicopter to drop off supplies at various houses, stopping along the way to pick up people needing rescue, grab keys to unlock doors, and remove debris, all while avoiding obstacles like birds.

It’s a decent enough premise, and actually a little reminiscent of videogame classic Choplifter, although this game doesn’t play much like that one. In fact, this game’s slow pace, terrible hit detection, and broken AI for the birds you’re avoiding means that this is an exceptionally easy game. Add to this nonsensical level design, and you have a game that just seems like a bizarre oddity rather than anything worth your time.

I suppose I should mention somewhere that the game tries to make things more interesting using an upgrade system, but it takes so long to earn the currency for these upgrades, and the game is so easy, that this element hardly seems present or necessary to quickly play through the game’s levels… if you even have the patience for that.

In the end, Humanitarian Helicopter seems like it had some good ideas, but from top to bottom everything about this game is executed poorly, from its poorly-designed challenge-free gameplay to its poorly-designed graphics to its poorly-designed gameplay. I suppose you’re not losing anything by getting this game if you have a Wii U, but if not you aren’t missing out on anything either.

tl;dr – Humanitarian Helicopter is a free-to-play Arcade-style game that has you flying around 2D areas in a helicopter dropping supplies and rescuing survivors. Everything about this game is poorly-designed and amateurish, from the simple, mindless gameplay to the laughably ill-conceived menus. If you have a Wii U, this game costs you nothing but your time, but even that might be too valuable to waste on this.

Grade: D

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Andy Miller, Exlene, Johannes, u/RamboFox, Ilya Zverev, Connor Armstrong, Eli Goodman, K.H. Kristoffer Wulff, and Stov. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}