A very unique kind of balance between a game and a simulator, that certainly won't fit anyone. I review and rate this game as it succeeded as a flight simulator to me, a flight simulator ethusianist.

If you haven't noticed already, this is Arma. The same engine, only with upgraded visuals, picture-in-3D picture availability, and a highly realistic flight model for helicopters. It also works like an Operation Arrowhead, that you can mount all Arma 2 DLCs into this, plus some ToH-specific expansions (yeah, you can play the normal Arma at this, with tanks, Chernarus, guns n stuff).

The main feature of this game, it's flight engine- it feels pretty damn realistic, even when compared to FSX or other simulators. I've spent some years on FSX and had no problems in X-Plane, but this game still needed some balls to master on the most realistic difficulty.
Do not play this game without a joystick, you're gonna miss a lot or not even be able to fly at all. I don't know if it's even possible to handle the helicopters safely at the most realistic setting, without majorly using the auto-hover option, flying only by mouse or keyboard. Joystick settings provide all forms of options, such as rebinding some axis, deathzones or individual sensitivities. Controls use the classical, Arma style of options, which was already confusing enough at Arma 2 but copied all the controls over to here and added several more to that, to make it even harder to navigate.

The campaign is quite fun and challenging. Between each missions, you're able to dwell around on the helipad, check your helicopter for issues, upgrade or repaint it and also buy a different one (for an ammount of cash that takes some time to get. By upgrades I mean usually mission-only equipment, such as a camera or a hook, but you can also buy doors, seats or a rear mirror which might come useful sometimes. It's not much of pimp yo choppa, and could be a bit more extended. But rather than that, I would have more than just three god damn machines, it also has no unique rideable planes. The description is kinda misleading in here:

WHAT IT SAYS: Three classes of helicopters
WHAT IT MEANS: Three helicopters, each with many different liveries or custom one-color RGB painting

Campaign is easy to screw up by selling a wrong helicopter and if you do so, you're bound to doing extremely tideous mission which self-repeats itself and takes even from 30 to 60 minutes (by adequately using the time acceleration), dozens of times. Asked other people several times but noone replied, because the community for this game (on both BIS forums and here) is probably dead.

The multiplayer is also dead. The server list is not working and ToH did not receive it's own server list hosting, like other Arma games did. The multiplayer mission making of this game has a high potential, but nobody apparently used it, as the community also doesn't care much about this thing (but you can still fly n fight around with friends if one can host). The new maps are HUGE, the Asia is like several kilometers across (expect a lower ground detail aswell, but it has one very large city full of accessible buildings, several times bigger than Chernogorsk), so flying in the asian map wouldn't feel "small" at all, even with a C-130, where amazing missions could be created.

But my goal is to rate this game for it's realism, not for how much armaish flaws or bad optimisation it has. And if you're a flight sim lover looking for challenges, I can't think of any harder helicopter flying experience. But if you expect a good combat experience as in Arma, lots of multiplayer action, detailed terrain and can't run Arma 2 decently with full settings and 3000 - 4000 visibility, you should rather leave this game where it is

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.

very nice game for people who like piloting a lot and want to be pilot :]

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.

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

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 can't really say I'd recommend this game. I've read that it's fairly realistic, which is cool, but it gets to the point where trying to fly gets too tedious to be fun. I tried for an hour to do my first flight and never got off the ground. YOu are forced to go through a ground school of sorts. THe controls were clunky and unclear as well. But at $5 I suppose you get what you pay for.

Not as good as it looked :-(

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

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.

Take on Helicopters is fairly accurate simulator for helicopters, although some aspects could use some improvement. But TOH also is a vehicle simulator. You can do dough-nuts in a Hummer if you like, or jump hills. It also models bullet trajectories pretty good. TOH is more than just a helicopter simulator. It is a gaming platform for player made missions. Single and multi-player.

Flying Helicopters in accurate flight models has a bit of a learning curve. This is what makes TOH good and bad. Good for hard-core simmers, bad for the kids that just want to shoot something. Career mode is just training to teach you to fly and get used to what the game offers. Player made missions is where the real action is. Well worth the money.

Definitely the most relaxing flight simulator I've played. It's very good to play while trying to chill out. Joystick highly recommended, as is a TrackIR or FreeTrack (or Oculus Rift hopefully one day), so that you can sit back and enjoy what helicopters do best: cruise.

The Armed Assault engine makes the helicopters fun to control without overly complex controls, and the skill envelope is just high enough to make it a fun game. Bohemia Interactive surprised me with this one.

The campaign is fun, too. Mechanic mode minigame that saves your company money, while immersing you in a small-business feeling. Every mission really adds to that feeling, as well.

4 / 5

-First Day Reviews-

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Highlights
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- Best User Friendly Helicopter Simulator
- Wide Selection Of Choppers
- Tons Of Fun Missions With A Cheesy Story
- Awesome Flying Physics
- Relax To Music And Fly Around Seattle!

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Journal Experience
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Journal Entry 1

I chose to fly the smaller black scouty chopper and after getting it in the air and learning the basics on flying I took off to venture the city. I was able to enjoy relaxing music and glide around Seattle taking in the sites. Beautiful vistas and sun flares bouncing off my windows, true relaxation.

Journal Entry 2

After a slightly more aggressive song entered my headphones I decided to test the limits of my chopper and dropped it closer to street level. I tested my skills by following a black Suv at 15M off his roof for what seemed like an hour, im sure the driver will go home paranoid tonight thinking the government is after him.

Journal Entry 3

Landed inside the stadium field in the middle of the city after fighting with some very violent winds. Felt like a pro even though im sure most pilots would be able to land a jet in the space that I had just proudly conquered.

Journal Entry 4

Unfortunately when I exited my chopper to walk around the stadium I forgot to tune down the lift controls.... So upon exiting I turned around just in time to see my chopper hover onto its side make a violent grinding noise and explode in a fiery wreckage.

Journal Entry 5

Now chopper-less I decided to proceed on foot and explore. But to my loss there was no open exits in the stadium so here I sit until they host the next baseball game :(

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Video Reviews
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Playthrough
Coming Soon

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================

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Fun helicopter simulator that is based of the Arma 2 engine, plays exaclty like it too. But unlike Arma 2 it goes more in depth with the controls. Learning curve is not to bad compared to other sim games like A-10.

I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone. Only to people who love to fly a helicopter with a bit more realism. And it's doing a decent job.

Great simulator. Gives much information about helicopters and it is always fun to know how to run a real metal bird.
I love when I have many buttons and switches around me. No matter that I don't have any idea about what they stand for.
Another perfect game from Bohemia Interactive!

+ MULTIPLAYER!!!!!!!!