As I approached what I thought to be a well pacified LZ, I was startled to see tracers coming at me from the starboard side of the chopper. In moments my door gunner lit up the sky with counter-fire. With a full load of troops in the back, the chopper was too low and slow, and we were far too heavy, to make an expeditious escape into the surrounding mountains; like it or not, I was going to have to drop these guys into a hot LZ.
I was able to offload enough guys to secure the camp, but that was the limit of my contribution to the cause as I climbed out to the east, eyeing the protective hills with a combination of hope and dread. Dread won the day as my H-34 blew up in a spectacular fireball. There were no survivors.
There are, of course, many similarities between the two. First, and most obvious, it is an online multiplayer combat game. You start at level 1 and up-level as you gain experience. You use the points earned in battle to work your way through an expansive tech tree. As you gain access to more capable equipment, you also gain access to more capable opponents. It is what Heliborne adds to the basic model that distinguishes it from the competition.
There are a number of ways to play Heliborne. The most traditional is player-vs-player wherein two teams go at it both in the air and on the ground in a game of Conquest, the goal of which is to capture and hold the preponderance of bases. The ground battle, for the most part, is handled by your AI troops. Your contribution comes from raining destruction and hellacious violence from the air. It is this aspect that brings forward the difference between warplanes and helicopters as fighting machines: air power cannot win wars. Ground troops without air cover cannot win wars. Helicopters, being the best of both words, can win wars.
You play as the orange team and your opposition plays as the blue team. At the start of a battle, you will each have one base (at least in level 1 and 2 - I enjoy the older piston helicopters so much that I have not yet moved into the turbine era) that serves as your resupply base. You will also have a collection of LZs already under your control, as will the opposition. LZs colored gray on the map are open to the first player to get some troops landed on them. To take an opponents base, you pretty much have to bomb it to oblivion using either your own aerial bullets, rockets, or missiles, or by providing aiming points for you mortar teams. Once the defenses are eradicated, you have to put some troops in place to hold it.
While it's still in early days, Heliborne is already well polished and provides a fantastic mix of tactical airborne helicopter and strategic decision making in a very affordable package. This one is well worth giving a try!
I've been fascinated with video games and computers for as long as I can remember. It was always a treat to get dragged to the mall with my parents because I'd get to play for a few minutes on the Atari 2600. I partially blame Asteroids, the crack cocaine of arcade games, for my low GPA in college which eventually led me to temporarily ditch academics and join the USAF to "see the world." The rest of the blame goes to my passion for all things aviation, and the opportunity to work on work on the truly awesome SR-71 Blackbird sealed the deal.My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1 that I bought in 1977 when they first came out. At that time you had to order them through a Radio Shack store - Tandy didn't think they'd sell enough to justify stocking them in the retail stores. My favorite game then was the SubLogic Flight Simulator, which was the great Grandaddy of the Microsoft flight sims.While I was in the military, I bought a Commodore 64. From there I moved on up through the PC line, always buying just enough machine to support the latest version of the flight sims. I never really paid much attention to consoles until the Dreamcast came out. I now have an Xbox for my console games, and a 1ghz Celeron with a
