Choplifter HD

All in all for 15 bucks for 1200 Microsoft points you have a lot of game and reasons to replay for quite some time.

Choplifter HD is an ace experience for bite-sized sessions and marathons alike. The goofy sense of humor, varied missions, and simple yet evolving gameplay style is a winning combination. It doesn't hold the gripping, satisfying appeal of Trials HD, Pinball FX, or Geometry Wars, but Choplifter HD is a great distraction from your usual addictions.

It's a bit pricey, but it delivers heftily on the great gameplay and supreme challenge, so if you're hardcore, you'll definitely get your money's worth here.

Good fun, if pricey. [Apr 2012, p.85]

Choplifter HD is what modern remakes or reboots should be, adherence to tradition with a whole lot of room for advancement and series progression.

Choplifter HD is a good - but not great - update to a real classic.

If you're looking for a game that can be picked up, enjoyed, and promptly placed back down for another time, not to mention at a price that won't break the bank, Choplifter HD is a solid, recommendable purchase.

Choplifter HD is not as addictive as the games I have compared it to, but it definitely walks that same line of action. If you enjoy small spurts of game time, with incentive to play levels over and over, this is a must buy. The price tag may be a bit steep for some, but it definitely warrants it if this is your thing. The game is polished, humorous and, most importantly, fun.

As rewarding as Choplifter HD can be, it demanded a few too many hours of trial and error for me to enjoy the game past the introductory levels, but the more masochistic amongst you will undoubtedly find something to love.

Beating levels will unlock different helicopters. So you can replay missions with birds that are faster and can carry more troops. All so you can get better completion times to move up the online leaderboards.

It's hardly an arcade classic, in other words, but if you're after nothing more than a friendly and frantic fifteen minutes of action every now and then, Choplifter HD just came to the rescue.

If you are no stranger to the type of punishment you remember from playing arcade games in the '80s, Choplifter HD is definitely worth checking out. This is game that doesn't mess around, and doesn't allow you to mess around either. I only wish it would have allowed you to mess around just a little bit more without mutilating your psyche in the process.

Quite a decent HD revision of a classic which fans of the original game will like. It keeps its main formula and adds some new features to update the gameplay to current times. However, some aspects needed more polish, as the game turns out to be repetitive and is not very replayable.

It is a fun game, and by jingo when it's at its best it's totally the updated Choplifter that I wanted to play.

The fun of this arcade classic remake fades quickly as repetition leads to boredom, but its unique objectives might make it worth looking into if you have some time to kill and cash to burn.

Somehow the simple mission style, sharp cheddar-y dialog and voice work, upgrade-unlock-chase (that is in every game these days), and straight-forward controls do add up to having some real charm.

Choplifter HD is a tough game to recommend if you aren't familiar with the series because enjoying it relies on liking its slower-paced gameplay.

You won't have much fun with this remake – unless you're an oldschool arcade aficionado. The basic core with its semi-tactical rescues stands the test of time, but the design is too simple and too frustrating to keep you occupied.

As fun as Choplifter can be, it's difficulty will but off most from making that second fly-by. [Issue#82, p.103]

An attempt to bring a classic game to a new audience that early on looks like a solid and fun game, but after a while shows its not so polished design. What was addictive and challenging in the early 1980's does not fly today. The somewhat cluncky, unprecise controls and inconsistent difficulty level makes Choplifter HD a games that initially lifts off with confidence but crashes halfway through and never really gets some air beneath its rotors.

Decent flying/shooting action with inertia, humour, and a number of design decisions that combine to provide endless amounts of frustration.

A very good update of the venerable arcade game and only a few niggles away from being a great game in its own right.

If you like the idea of flying a cool-looking helicopter in a 2D action game that makes you think, Choplifter HD is totally worth checking out. When it works, it's old-fashioned and yet not quite like anything else out there currently. If the chopper had controlled just a bit more nimbly, it's possible all of the game's problems would disappear or at least be reduced to much more tolerable levels.

While the game in its essence is a side scrolling adventure, the frustrations of combining poor gaming controls with a lackluster HD graphic remake and next to nothing audio work make the 1200 MS point price tag an undisputed rip off of the gaming community.

Choplifter HD retains the core elements of its forebears, but the experience is dampened by some missteps in tone and difficulty.

There are just so many better ways to spend your money, like on a copy of the original Choplifter or any other of the good and unique games available on downloadable services. The only sort of person who should buy this game is someone who thinks that the original Choplifter would be the best game ever if it had sort of funny voice acting.

Choplifter HD would be an excellent game in the arcades, mostly because each level only takes a few minutes to complete. Unfortunately, this short length leads to the fact that it's unpleasant to play in the living room. The requirement of multitasking in the heat of battle in the later levels, makes up for this a little bit. We would rather plug in our old NES again.

We're all for dolled up remakes of arcade classics, and those are some lovely backgrounds, but this one needs to be rescued from the limitations of its own design.

As you grit your teeth through 30 missions, you'll run into frustration aplenty. [Feb 2012, p.76]

Despite the flaws in the execution, it's more Choplifter. And for a select few, that still means something.