Rescue Helicopter Simulator 2014

The Good
This is a simple game. It's been designed to be simple. It has no music, no voice instructions, and no documentation apart from a four screen tutorial that tells you all you need to know.

Now even though it's simple it's still important to read the instructions. I didn't do this and spent ages achieving nothing because, having located the victims, I failed to click on them to transfer them to the helicopter. Once I realised my error the game came to life and I breezed through the first eleven missions in an hour. It was a pleasant experience but not especially memorable

The Bad
There are parts of the game that are just wrong.
The spelling mistakes, "Patients as Pacients" and "Loaded as Laoded" and I think I saw a couple more, just should not happen in a modern game where everyone has access to a spell checker and on-line translation tools.
There's a car crash rescue where the victims were located out at sea, this is another fault that should have been picked up in game testing.

Then there are the controls. They are way to simple for this to call itself a simulator. Call it a game by all means but for me it's not a simulator just because it references real life in some way.
two hands are needed to play this game. One hand has to keep the 'W' key depressed because the helicopter loses height as soon as that key is released. The other hand is occupied with the arrow keys or the mouse. It's not a gamebreaker but it just felt a little clumsy.
Also, and this is not a gamebreaker either but to be offered the next challenge the player has to click on the 'New Mission' button . This is fine but don't try it while flying close to a building because the mouse can also be used to steer the helicopter and it's possible to crash while trying to click on that button.

There's no music and there's no audio from chopper control so the only sound, at least the only sound I can remember, is the 'thwacka-thwacka-thwacka' of the helicopter rotors. It was reasonably good but I've heard better and it didn't change pitch as the craft changed speed, altitude or direction.

The graphics on the whole were good. However there were times when the helicopter blades would freeze completely.

In the end the game's simplicity was, for me, its downfall. each mission has been simplified to flying between the hospital and the victims, sometimes more than once, within a time limit. Sure there are obstacles to avoid but ultimately after flying a dozen missions I realised there's no real challenge, no further learning curve and so I stopped.

Finally I quit the game to the main menu and found that there was no save game function there, I had to restart the game and pause it in order to get the chance to save progress to date. Generally I thought the manual save and load functions seemed out of place in a modern game,

The Bottom Line
The game comes with a PEGI 3+ rating and perhaps that's where I went wrong. As a game for young children there is possibly just enough excitement and sense of achievement for them to enjoy the game.

For me it was a pleasant but not memorable hour of gaming that I won't be repeating.