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Bug

video of me doing one of the extreme time trials in this game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzOpNE7_YK0
Take On Helicopters has similar strengths and weaknesses to the ARMA series, only more so. It tries to bridge the gap between simulators and conventional video games, which it does with some success. There are few niche games like this, so it is good when one shows up, even if it is not perfect. It reminds me a bit of SimCopter from 1996.

Realism and flight physics are very good but not perfect. There is a start-up procedure, but it is simplified. There is no autopilot but there is an optional auto-hover helper. The controls have the same kind of problems as in ARMA, and I had to spend a long time tweaking them. Unlike most sims, you control a human as you would in any shooter game, who in turn can board and pilot helicopters realistically.

There is a career mode that has interesting missions and a decent believable story. It takes 10-15 hours but I wish it was longer. There is also a small management aspect - you can buy new equipment, inspect your helicopter, and pay for maintenance to prevent breakdowns. While the voice acting is good, it does have a low-budget / mod feel with crude character animations etc. And as with ARMA, some missions were a bit difficult, and had unreliable scripting, forcing me to retry a few times. Overall, I still enjoyed it.

Then there are the more challenging time trials, where you have to fly as fast as you can through virtual hoops placed between buildings and under bridges etc. The courses range from moderate to insane - these are awesome, but require you to have mastered the helicopter controls . They are probably the most intense and challenging races I have tried in any game, partly thanks to the additional vertical dimension - car racing games are so 2-dimensional by comparison (pun intended).

Contrary to what most say, the graphics look good and I get a decent 60 fps with only ocasional slowdowns to 40 fps (with an i5-4570 and overclocked GTX660). The Seattle environment is detailed and beautiful. I did have to carefully tweak the video settings though. My youtube video stutters a bit but that is just youtube, the game was smooth.

Sadly multiplayer does not work, due to the gamespy server shutdown. While you can just about play with a keyboard or controller, you really do need a '3-axis + thruster' joystick (about $30).
Despite its flaws, I would strongly recommend this to mature patient gamers willing to try a flight sim.

If you're looking for a semi-realistic civilian helicopter-simulation, this is it. Some might be turned off by the the lack of things you can do in the cockpit. However, I think that you can do JUST enough to make it fun, without being forced to read a manual at the same time. You will need an above-average computer to even run this game, since the engine is.. Well.. Poorly optimized. Sit back, take off, fly civilians around, take pictures of whales and listen to your favorite songs while enjoying a glass of whisky - that is what this game is about - and it does JUST that, pretty darn good.

Two of us got this game to play CO-OP. Managed to get it working over the internet using a program called Tunngle which creates a virtual LAN connection over the internet. Easy once we did it this way. The game is quite good but does take some time to learn how to fly & land. The missions do take a long time to play but i guess thats because its a simulator not an arcade game.

I enjoy playing the rescue games on this flight simulator. It gives a better sense on how a helicopter should properly work, though I never had flown one in real before. It's fun to fly around and simply have good time, if you enjoy playing with helicopters and just flying around for the site scenes.

Very good sim that is very rewarding once mastered. The missions offer a different spin from your typical combat sim with missions like whale watching transport and emergency lifts.

I like it, it is not up to DCS stander but it is well made.

Take On Helicopters, another great game made by Bohemia Interactive.

Rating at the moment: 7.5/10

Take On Helicopters(TKOH) is a semi-realistic helicopter simulator based on the Arma 2 Real VIrtuality 3 engine, which also runs DayZ standalone, an insanely popular game. As you fly around cloudy morning Seattle, you listen to nice music on your phone, and attempt to deliver cargo, passengers, give ppl joyrides, etc... On full realism, it gets tougher to fly, adding to how fun the game is. The atmosphere of the game is great, and it just feels amazing. What could be wrong? Well, the controls are clunky, and the game gets very repetitive. The game is very badly optimised, and even clocks 20 fps average on my 2k workstation rig. Close up, the map looks awful. This takes away hugely from the game, making my rating plummet.

Sound: epic
Visuals: good enough
Bugs: not very many
Replayable: I doubt you could finish the story without dying of boredom.
Content: Considering that the map is 3.8k square kilos, the map is quite nice, however close up, not really.
Developers: Game is quite old, doesn't have many updates.
Voice acting: Bohemia was never good at voice acting, and this is no acception.

What is Needed:
More content (music, helos, a little more map detail)
More players (which they can't really change :/)
Better Multiplayer
OPTIMISATION

Is it worth buying? That would be your choice. The game is epic, but has many flaws. I would suggest getting it on discount.

I don't understand why there are so many negative comments on the game, I've played Microsoft Flight Simulator X and Longbow II as well as Take on Helicopters, and all have their strengths and weaknesses, but this game felt like I was actually learning to fly a helicopter as some of the fast paced missions stumped me for a bit, but with persistence and saving at key points, it has been a very good experience.

Should I play this?:
If you enjoyment of being immersed in a good story, and upgrading the various helicopters to take on more missions, this will not disappoint. The military sims are enjoyable, and definitely challenging, but seem to hurry past the learning to fly and focus more on combat. There is a good mix of civilian, transport, and law enforcement/military missions which allow you to earn money and buy all the upgrades, there can be an issue if you sell a helicopter you need, so picking up extra missions is helpful. I would do often walk around inspections of each heli before taking on a mission to significantly lower the repair bill.

Realism:
Without a doubt, this is the most realistic feeling physics in a flight simulator I've played to date. With flight Simulator X I almost feel the helis were an afterthought addition because it lacks certain flight physics that require the constant adjustments required to keep the helicopters in flight. In Take On Helicopters, the wind and added weight of personnel and cargo changes how the helicopters fly, the copters accrue damage and can feel like a rickety bucket of bolts, giving an impending doom feeling before they ultimately reach maximum entropy and fall out of the sky. I had more than a few instances where I killed the Huey because I failed to properly finesse them through the trial without burying the throttle and burning out the engine.

Bugs:
Every simulator has it's glitches, I've seen more glitches in Flight Sim X than I have in TOH. Only one instance have I seen a glitch and pressed escape, then selected skip in the menu.

Cool game with realistic controls and mechanics. I wouldnt buy it for $20 though. wait for it to go on sale like i did.

I love Arma, so a year after its release, I wanted to try this too. After 40 minutes of the game I experianced so many bugs! A year after release! Come on, seriously?

This game is fun to mess around with, but it's extremely hard to get control of the helicopter, and it's not well documented on how to do certain things. For some tutorials, you will be drilled to the last click, but for others, they give you a vague statement such as slowdown, and then you're on your own. A training system that went into detail into the tiny bits and pieces that make flying easier would have been nice, and as such I'm stuck forever trying to land a damn helicoper correctly.

If you are OK with the Arma II engine and you love helicopters/you want to learn to fly them in the Arma universe You will want this game!
I recommend it to anyone who plays Arma and DayZ

CONS:
Multi-player is removed.
Might run badly on weaker systems.
If you aren't familiar with the Arma engine the UI is horrible.

good simulation game. a little hard to initially get set up.

Take On Helicopters é um bom jogo, porém o preço cobrado na minha opnião é realmente alto. O game em si tem uma programação muito boa mas existem milhares de bugs e problemas com a engine. Não estou falando que não é bom,é apenas um game com um preço elevado para o que ele apresenta, como simuladar é otimo e seu modo multiplayer é muito legal. A Bohemia Interactive fez um bom trabalho, mas nada perfeito. Não testei o modo Cooperativo pois não encontrei ninguem querendo jogar, entre Arma II e Take On Helicopters eu comraria Arma II. Recomendo o game principalmente se você gosta dos jogos da Bohemia.
Nota: 6,4

Gostei muito do jogo, graficos excelentes como todos os jogos da BI. Conseguiram deixar o jogo bem interativo e realista, recomendo para todos que gostam de simuladores de aviação!

Simulador muito bom com um requinte de estratégia nas missões por poder equipar as aeronaves com diversos itens faltou uma liberdade maior nas missões para escolha do que fazer no modo carreira mas recomendo é um bom simulador indispensavel uso de um bom joystick.

I own this game quite a while, occasionally taking free flights in Seattle and i must admit - level of detail in envelopment is far beyond for any flight simulator game even today. There is probably thousand of different models for buildings, not only for landmark, but any major building have it's own model and detailed texturing. Those also all collision enabled, meaning you can crash or land on. Even trees are crashable 3D models. You can even land and get out of your bird and start playing ARMAII in Seattle. Or in normal ARMAII maps - if you own it in Steam.

I was so looking forward to start playing single player campaign, imagining limitless country of fun with all goodness above combining with full range of civil helicopter's activities, starting with simple taxi missions and ending with sling load operation and search-and-rescue mission using FLIR (thermal vision camera).

To my very disappointment there is - as we russians say - one spoon of ♥♥♥♥ in barrel of honey. And it's flying itself. I'm not IRL pilot so i can't explain things in the right worlds, but i own (and fly almost daily) DCS UH-1 and X-Plane 10 with some payware helos, so i guess i know that is right and that is wrong. And TKOH helicopters are behaves wrong. More of that - they all share same dynamics, just with different coefficients. For example all of them have same speed. It's not like i didn't notice that playing free flights, i just thought i could deal with slow response, overreacting titling and nonexistent transition on lightest bird in campaign.

Turns out what with adding more power by coefficients thing only becomes worse, so heaviest copter not only overreacting inputs (but still slow) but tends to get lift with smallest lateral movement and suddenly drop it then you manage to get steady. Combined with oversaturated (remember - we have add power) tendency for forward movement (you need a several degrees of back pitch to hold it in place) makes most docile and presumable easy to hover craft unmanageable. So on second container in 7th mission of campaign i ragequit.

Speaking of campaign - in 7 (+2 sidemissions) missions i did, there was only two civilian missions. Three if you count whale seeing mission, but single engine helo without emergency water landing equipment not sounds like civilian job for me here. And there is more of such nonsense. Why two-engine helicopters goes down after one failed? Yeah we have two turbine for fancier look. Why we need rope insertion on flat roof in heavy wind, especially after i perfectly landed before mission marker even appears.

Concluding, i wouldn't recommend this game to any flight sim enthusiast. Despite perfect envelopment flying itself is unbearably broken and won't be fixed because of 3rd party component BI have to rely here.

CAUTIOUS THUMBS UP: *THE FREE DEMO HAS VIRTUALLY THE SAME CONTENT AND ENTERTAINMENT VALUE*
I DO like it, but wouldn't buy it until you try the demo first.

But its saving grace is the "Reloaded" update in the full game which means you can fly around in maps from other BI games (Arma1, Arma2 chernarus, tavania etc), which makes it cool and worth the money (the demo can't run mods and addons)

Unless its in a Steam Sale I wouldn't recommend this as a standalone heli-sim when there are far better (and free) flight simulators out there with a lot more content.

But if you just want to chill out flying an easy helicopter around, the sound effects are ok, the missions are fairly simple and basic, but at the end of the day most people will have to leave the graphics on medium and probably just fly around a bit in free flight while they're waiting for dinner then put it down and forget about it for a while.
on a scale of 1 to 10 for being memorable: 4

TL:DR
Maybe I missed the point of this game - But it doesn't seem to have a unique selling point or do anything particularly well enough to make you come back to it very often