Chopper 1.2.4

Chopper is a side-scrolling arcade game that has as a main element a helicopter.

Even though it's is an old style game, it can keep you pretty captivated and it is also quite addictive. I spent countless hours playing this game before starting to write this review. Each mission of this game brings something new and it makes things more complicated for you. This increasing difficulty makes the game keep you attached to the chair while playing Chopper.

In each of the missions you have to rescue civilians. You also have to avoid your enemy's open fire. The enemies are either bazooka men, tanks, or jet planes. The chopper is not defenseless though. You can strike back with the machine-gun that has unlimited ammo, you can use drop bombs or you can fire rockets against the enemies.

An interesting thing is the fact that you can use multiple ways to take down your enemies. For example you can land on a bazooka man or if he stands on a building, you can destroy that building by firing a rocket which kills all the people that are on that building, or you can use your other weapons. Another nice thing is the fact that the machine gun can take down all of your the enemies, including the tanks.

The biggest issue from the game are the jet planes. The challenge itself is not the jet plane, but the smart missiles that they use. These missiles are very dangerous especially if you are close to a building, or you are landed, rescuing civilians.

The civilian rescue is a delicate operation because you have to make sure that you won't kill the civilian while landing, taking out one of your enemies, or shooting down a jet plane that drops on a civilian. Also you have to make sure that you do a straight landing, because otherwise the helicopter explodes. If you have occupants in the helicopter while your helicopter explodes, then all the civilians are killed. Once you pick up all the civilians, or the chopper is full, you have to go straight to the landing pad. The mission ends when you rescue all the alive civilians. You don't have to rescue all of them, but you have to rescue a certain number of them. When a civilian dies, your score for that mission gets lower and you lose the score bonus for perfect .

Pluses: it is well designed, it usually doesn't have lags when commanding the helicopter, it keeps you connected, and above all it's amazing for a free game.

Drawbacks / flaws: you can't use a custom setup for the keyboard controls, if you play in large resolutions when there are a lot of smoke and dust particles the game has some lags.

In conclusion: this is one of the best freeware games that I played on Macintosh. If you like the side-scroling games, you may give Chopper a chance.

version reviewed: 1.0.4