Overview
iCopter is an adaptation of the popular “Helicopter” flash game that took the Internet by storm a few years ago. The game is incredibly simplistic - touch your screen to go up, take your finger off to go down. Players use this mechanic to navigate a cave full of stalactites, stalagmites, and inexplicable floating-in-mid-air-mites. You gain score for every unit of distance you travel, but hit an obstacle and it’s game over.
Features
iCopter has no loading screens, and all you have to do to start a new game is tap the title screen. After you die, the title screen comes right back up and you’re a tap away from another game. This is perfect for me, because upon dying I usually mash whatever button is required for a restart, furiously awaiting my next shot at whatever it is that killed me.
Once again, the entire control scheme is as follows: touch the screen to go up, release it to go down. Sounds easy, right? It is. Once you get the feel of it, you’ll be flying like a pro. While I enjoy a challenge, I usually prefer that the challenge isn’t to figure out how to control the game, and iCopter caters directly to that mindset.
If you’re going down too fast, you’ll have to hold your finger on the screen for longer to achieve upward motion. Momentum and gravity play a large part in the movement of your chopper. This creates a swooping, careening feel to the gameplay that I felt added to both the feel of flying and to the challenge of the game.
The twists and turns you encounter will be different each time you play, so you’ll have to rely on your reaction time rather than your level-memorizing skills.
iCopter adds a few ways to customize your helicopter game experience. Changing the color of the walls, the model of your chopper, the speed of flight, and the time it takes to return to the title screen after death are all nice little perks.
Breakdown
The Good:
iCopter is great to pull out in a line or when you’re just bored. It provides the same kind of beat-your-high-score motivation found in old arcade games like Pac-Man. If you were the type to pump quarters into a Donkey Kong machine when arcades were still in their prime, beware the addiction factor here.
As mentioned above, this game works great on the iPhone. The tap-to-fly controls are easy to learn, but not so easy to master. I’ve heard about some other helicopter game apps out there featuring controls that use the accelerometer to move back and forth. That might add another dimension to the gameplay, but for this app I’m glad they stuck with the original helicopter game mechanics.
For some reason, keeping my chopper in the air for longer than a couple minutes is tough for me, and I like games that don’t just lay down and let me beat them. A reasonably challenging arcade-style game is great to have on my iPhone, and the low price is easy on your wallet.
The Bad:
It annoyed me that to get to any kind of options I had to leave the app and go to my iPhone’s settings menu, since things like flight speed are something a player might want to adjust on the fly (no pun intended). Hiding it in the settings menu seemed like an odd choice. Surely it can’t be that hard to make an in-app options screen. That said, this didn’t get in the way of my enjoyment. I checked out the settings once, adjusted them to my liking, and proceeded to swerve into ceilings, floors, and obstacles all night long.
This seems to be a straight port of the helicopter game. I haven’t looked at the original in a while, but everything from the lo-res ceilings and floors to the neon green color scheme seems to be intact. I would have liked to see some innovation on the developer’s part. Why not update the graphics to something a little slicker and include a “retro” option for players who want it the old way?
Verdict
This is a faithfully-done recreation of a flash classic. If you like exercising your reflexes and have a spare dollar, this app will provide you with some enjoyment every now and then. If you’re the type who played the original helicopter game for hours on end when you discovered it on a flash site, definitely snag this. Personally, I’m the “just one more game” type, so when I fire this app up I usually get sucked in pretty easily. For a buck, I say it’s worth it.
