First Impressions: Dustoff Heli Rescue II (NS)

Disclaimer:  I received Dustoff Heli Rescue II for the Nintendo Switch free of charge from developer Rainy Frog and publisher Ratalaika Games through Indie Gamer Chick's #IndieSelect.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and shared through social media channels.  All words contained in this article unless otherwise noted are my own.

I am going to keep this article semi-short as I am only on the 8th mission out of 35, and the 7th mission as well as the 8th, are a real doozy as they have ramped up the difficulty a lot more than the previous missions, but I will get to all of that in a bit.

Dustoff Heli Rescue II is a side scrolling game where you take control of one of different types of military helicopters customized for missions varying from supply drop, to attack incoming hostiles, to rescue missions, and plenty of variation in between.  The concept is pretty simple and would not be out of place on an Atari or original NES cartridge. The execution though is where the DHRII would bust out of its 384Kb cartridge.  Visually, DHRII reminds me a lot of Minecraft, if the camera pulled waaaay back and hovered a few hundred feet above the ground, following the helicopter as it flies left/right/up/down towards the destination.  And in that, the controls are pretty simple.  With the exception of the A-button.  The A-button, I think, prevents your helicopter from firing upon targets, or at least that is what I think it does based on what the game tells me during play.  On the Controls Setting screen, it looks as if pressing A fires the gun on your helicopter, but I feel firing/not firing is really only important when you are running low on ammunition.

To Return to Repair/Re-Supply or Keep Going?

There are a couple of additions to this basic formula, but conventional to gaming.  In most missions (I think it is most as opposed to all) there is an odd greenish-yellow colored smoke signal next to crates that point out a resupply station.  At these locations, you can heal/repair the helicopter as well as resupply on ammunition, but also save the game, allowing you to restart if you die before completing the mission.  The downside to relying on these resupply stations is that they can take up valuable time if you are trying to earn the full three stars, and if you die at all during the mission, you will immediately lose a star if you restart from this checkpoint.  And like a lot of Three Star Games, you do need a required amount of stars in order to continue to the next level, but thankfully I have not come across a level that I did not immediately have access to.  A side quest of sorts too, is recovering dog tags (usually five to six per mission) that can be used to purchase, but are not a requirement for completing levels or earning stars.

The only real complaints I have about the game is selecting things when in a menu mode.  There is a bright green box that surrounds what it is that you are selecting, but something about this particular shade of green seems to fit in really well with the whole color scheme of the game, and more than once I clicked a mission that I did not mean to.  There have been a couple of other times where it seemed to take a second for the game to register my menu selection, leading me to pressing the A button again and ending up selecting something that I had not originally intended.  Oh, and I guess the secondary complaint is the jump in difficulty that I am currently facing in Mission 8.

One thing I want to mention, is that while playing Dustoff Heli Rescue II, for some reason I started wanting the game to have a Star Wars skin on it.  I wanted to be flying some type of Corellian freighter, snow speeder, or some other Star Wars ship during the events leading up to and through The Force Awakens.  Here you would be attacking First Order outposts, rescuing resistance fighters, basically everything that you are already doing here.  The game style would not change, only the look of the vehicles, the sound effects, and the music would all be from the Star Wars universe.  This is not to knock anything that Rainy Frog has done with this game, but if Disney gave them a license to make the exact same game but with a Star Wars skin, I would be not at all disappointed.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Throw Your Arms Around Me