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

I don't really recommend this game to

1) people who consider themselves average helicopter pilots in arma 2/3 because the learning curve requrired in this game is much higher and you need a very good understanding of helicopter physics to jump into this game.

2) people who seek a high fidelity, ultra realistic helicopter flight simulation. VBS3.0 or DCS UH-1H Huey gives budding pilots a much better benchmark for those who want to see how helicopter perform in real life.

3) people who don't have joysticks/pedals/throttles/TRACK IR's- as soon as I jumped into the game, it just felt wrong trying to fly with a mouse and keyboard. Like with most sims nowadays, it's not so much the game, it's the hardware you use on the game. So consider trying the demo first with your current setup, and ugrade as neccessary if you feel the need to.

Hope this helped anyone.

Put aside all the awful bugs, including a multi-step process that I had to go through just to get the Hind DLC, which I payed for, to work, and you have a fundamentally flawed game. That flaw? The engine.

This feels like the ARMA engine equivalent of a bad sourcemod. And it does feel like a mod. The menus are awful, the game looks awful, feels awful, and doesn't run as well as it really should.

For people who are familiar with the ARMA engine, I only leave you with one warning: this is ARMA, but with more helicopters and none of the fun of ARMA. Whether that appeals to you, is personal preference.

Take on Helicopters is an attempt to prove that civil aviation does not have to be boring. The problem of this game is that it sits on a fence between mass accessibility and hardcore simulation. It's competent in both cases but I'm not sure it can win over either group of players.This game will satisfy those eager for aerial simulation, but will result in a little approachable game for the rest of players, if not just plain boring. It is a good simulator, very demanding and with plenty of content to enjoy for hours. However, its poor narrative and lackluster optimization let mixed sensations.