Heliborne released - it's time to rain destruction from the air

After a successful Early Access, Heliborne, which you would be tempted to refer to as "World of Choppers" if it wasn't actually so much better than that, released on October 12. Put together by JetCat Games, a small four-person dev team, it is truly an amazing piece of work that stands toe-to-toe with MMO combat games built by far larger teams and, quite frankly, shows them how it should be done.

Heliborne uses the same tech tree mechanics that are de rigueur in the mechanized battle genre, but adds some innovative game play mechanics that do a much better job at getting total strangers to work together as a team. For any given mission, it will take the cooperative efforts of pilots flying three different classes of chopper to get the job done: small and nimble scout/recon helicopters flush out troops and AA emplacements, heavy and sluggish troop transports are needed to place troops in areas that need to be captured and held, and gunships blow up whatever needs to be blown up. No single class of chopper can meet the mission objectives alone.

All of this happens in a span of helicopter history ranging from the early days of the 1950's when militaries around the world were struggling to find the best ways to use the new technology to the modern airborne tanks of the current day.

Watch for a review here at Gaming Nexus within a week or so, or however long it takes for me to stop playing it long enough to write about it. 

Heliborne is available on Steam for PC, Mac, and Linux.