Giveaway of the Day - Helic

In Brief

I’m really happy this one has been repeated., it wasn’t a free standing game like some giveaways so I lost it when reinstalling windows some time ago on one of my older computers. This game is art of a series of games of this genre that cover the world wars, modern avionics and helicopters. It was originally given away back in October 2010 and received a positive 50% of votes out of 414 votes. There were 39 comments which can be seen HERE. The game is basically an arcade flyer with 3D graphics. You can fly through stylized environments destroying ground targets and shooting down enemy planes and helicopters. Controls are very simple, with flying accomplished either via a keyboard or mouse.

Good news is you can also use Joysticks, in fact joysticks work the way you’d expect then to work, i.e. pull back on the stick to increase in altitude (nose up) push forwards on the stick to reduce altitude (nose down).

Also good news; if you have an X-Box controller for windows that will also work so long as you install the drivers for it. You can get those from Microsoft or various other sites. Make sure you get the 64 bit version if you have a 64 bit platform and 32 bit etc etc.

Helic

The game downloads to a 42.2Mb zipped file containing a read me and a dual activation and setup module. (Unlike the previous time when we got a registration code and the set up file size was at least 20MB more). To newcomers this means just click on the giveaway wrapped set up file and select your installation path (if you wish the game to go to somewhere other than the default path). Once installed the game is automatically registered The installed games footprint is 68.9Mb in size (this is also around 30MB smaller than the last time we got this program). On starting the game It installs to:

C:/Program Files/Helic.Eng/Helic.Exe

The game plays okay on XP Pro with SP3 32 Bit, Vista Home Basic 64 bit and Win 7 Pro 64 bit.

No shortcut is installed to the desktop or the start men programs folder nor is there an uninstaller installed so to uninstall you just have to delete the installed folder.

Introduction

Players can try their flying and shooting skills at three campaigns: Islands, Europe and the Middle East. As they complete levels, players gain access to new, more manoeuvrablelic game play helicopters, more powerful enemies and unexpected surprises. Easy game controls allow new players to quickly get in the thick of things. In addition to helicopters, some missions can be completed at the controls of combat fighters. Survival mode offers a rapid-fire shooting gallery option for gameplay. Ready for takeoff? Wheels up!

Reference accessed HERE 2nd Oct 2010

The Game

Helic uses the same games engine as previous Fly games that have been given away such as Sky Aces: World at War, Sky Aces: The Red Baron and Sky aces: Cold War, though the game looks to have been improved somewhat. The environments are much the same with perhaps a few more buildings. All ground buildings are destructible. Flying is easy, you can use either the mouse or the keyboard to control your plane. To fire weapons use the left and right mouse buttons (chain gun and rockets). You can pick up health packs and resupply ammo and rockets by flying over bonus coins.

The game has two modes; the first is standard play which is the main campaign, where you start with a training flight then are taken through missions that take you through different locations that include European Skies, Islands and Afghanistan. In survival mode you can choose where to go from the above locations as well as choose the time of day, which include, Early morning, Sunny, Cloudy, Evening and night, you can also choose three levels of escort from Easy, Standard and Armada. Both modes have three levels of skill, Tourist, Warrior and Hardcore. The difference between the three is the number of enemies you have in the sky at any one time.

There are three helicopters to choose from, the first being the only one unlocked at the start of the game. The demo only gave me 15 minutes of play, so I didn’t get the opportunity to find out how you unlock the other two choppers. You get a Gazelle Eurocopter, a SA320 Puma and a UH34 Choctaw helicopter.

You can change the screen resolution between 800 x 600 x 32 to 1920 x 1080 x 32 with 30 different resolutions to choose from. There’s also a quality slider, which is useful if your computer isn’t so powerful. If you get any lag, reduce the screen resolution and quality settings to a point where the lag disappears. There’s also a music toggle which allows you to turn off the in game music if you wish.

Controls

• Mouse Movement – Direction
• Q/W/E – Turns
• WASD – Power/Strafe
• F1 – Display Help
• F2 – Display Map
• Up Arrow – Low speed
• Down Arrow – Full speed
• Left Arrow – Turn & Strafe Left
• Right Arrow – Turn & Strafe Right
• LMB – Machine gun
• RMB – Rockets

Features

• 10 helicopters based on actual models

• 3 campaigns, 20 fast-paced missions

• Survival quick game play mode

• Original soundtrack

System Requirements

- Windows 98/ME/XP/Vista
- Pentium III processor
- 256 Mb RAM
- 50 Mb hard drive space
- 32 Mb video memory
- Sound card
- DirectX 7

Conclusion

Overall I loved playing this game. It’s easy to pick up and hard to put down. Compared to my DCS: Black Shark Helicopter Simulation it’s the easiest helicopter game I’ve played in a long time; it’s similar in game play to the many freebies available from Gametop, MyPlaycity and FreeGamePick (see below, with two big differences, 1) … you are flying in an open 3D world (compared to flying in a scrolling environment) and 2) … All ground objects are destructible. The game is well made and an improvement on earlier games in this series (mentioned above). It’s reminiscent of some of the arcade flying shooters I remember playing many years ago in the arcades, but today’s game has much better graphics.

I think Helic is worth a good 8 out of 10 for ease of play and a well rounded campaign; however, I’m a little biased with respect to scoring this game; so some may think I’m overly generous.

Scoring

Download and installation – 10
Registration process – 10
Graphic Appearance in Game – 7+7
Audio – 7
Game Play – 9+8
Replayability – 7
Originality – 7

Total score 72 out of 90 which equates to 8 out of 10

I’ve scored this game quite high because iI think it’s different from your run of the mill HOG’s, TM games and match threes, which have become the main stay of the arcade buisness. Though a burgeoning indie movement is slowly taking over (thankfully). It’s got some reasonable game play and is easy to pick up. As aleady mentioned below, it would have been much improved if you were able to reverse the mouse movement. I always crash when i first play this type of game after a break. (I’ve still got a couple of these from previous giveaways).

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If todys game doesn’t take your fancy then check out the game discussion forums and the free games synopsis. We’ve posted a couple of thousand free games over the last three years, some of which are fantastic.

All of the major game distributors such as Steam, Impulse and GOG all have some sales with savings as good as 75% in some cases.

Todays 24hr deal is And Yet it Moves with 75% off. A new 24 hour deal starts at 6pm GMT. Every day on Steam. you can also get 66% of both the Serious Sam pack that contains 8 Serious Sam related games (Serious Sam 3: BFE, Serious Sam 2, Serious Sam first and Second encounters, both the originals and the remastered HD versions as well as two Indie offshoots called Serious sam: Double D and Serious Sam: Random encounters, you can check the deal out HERE. There’s also 66% off Deus Ex: Human Revolution, (though I think it’s available cheaper on Green Man Gaming) plus a few other minor deals. Over on Gamestop you can get 78% off the 2K bundle costing $69.99 (only available in America) and containing several premium games that include: BioShock, Borderlands, CivCity: Rome Civilization III Complete Edition, Duke Nukem Forever, Mafia II, Shattered Union (XP Only), Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: The Complete Collection (Sid Meier’s Civilization IV, Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword, Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization, Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Warlords), Sid Meier’s Civilization V, Sid Meier’s Pirates!, Sid Meier’s Railroads! (XP Only), and finally the X-COM Pack – (X-COM: Apocalypse, X-COM: Enforcer, X-COM: Terror from the Deep, X-COM: UFO Defense), plus they have some more deals such as 50% off Miners Wars 2081 Pre Alpha and another alpha called A Valley Without Wind). Gamersgate as usual have well over a 100 sale items ranging from 95% off for an 86 pack gamers delight (this pack has every strategy game 1C have ever released, with some premium titles, the cot for the pack is less than $70 working ot at less than a dollar per game. This is a ridiculously low price and your chance to own some fantastic games. You can find them all HERE and includes for example The Theatre of War franchise, Star Wolves franchise, Men of War franchise, Kings bounty Franchise, plus a whole load of other excellent games. The actual cost before the deal is taken into account over a thousand pounds/ $1500). There are loads more games on special offers, too many to mention here. You can check out all of the main distributors deals via the Didematic Site

There are some no strings attached freebies from Alawar and Realore (well you do have to install Alawars gamebox and register a free account over at Realore). You can get Flowery Vale a match three from alawar and a word puzzle called Aqua Words from Realore. The Alawar freebie is usually available for around a month (it’s already been available for three weeks or more) and the Realore game changes every Friday.

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Problems installing, activating and running today’s game:

If you have difficulty downloading or activating the game you can try again later or do one of the following – for example once downloaded when you click on the dual activation and set up file you may get the message “Failed to connect. Please try again later” Check to see if your internet explorer isn’t offline (thanks to MrSnoozles/Mike and GMMan for that fix). If the previous suggestion doesn’t work go check out previous comments from the last several weeks and look for comments from GMMan and Mike. They have also posted their possible fixes for this problem.

Mike suggests that you check to see if Internet Explorer is offline (even if you use firefox). If it is make sure that it’s online thn try again. I’ve always tried re-booting my modem and/or router with some success, though Mike has said that doing that does nothing. Still, it’s worth a try if all else fails.

If you are getting the black screen problem right click on the games executable and select properties then click on the compatibility mode and select the disable visual themes. This should fix the problem, if not try disabling the display scaling on higher dpi settings and disabling the desktop composition.

Other fixes include changing your screen resolution, installing the latest direct X (remember that XP uses DX 9 or earlier only, Vista uses DX 10 or before and Win 7 DX11 or before). Also try updating your graphics drivers. The main two chip manufacturers are NVIDIA and ATI (now AMD) both of which offer driver downloads for free. Just go to the respective manufactures home page and you’ll find a link to the driver download page. To find out which graphic card or graphics chip your computer uses type in Dxdiag in the search field (Vista or Win 7) or the run command (XP); this opens up the DirectX diagnostics panel. click on the display tab and look to the left panel. You should easily see what graphics card or chip you are using. (This is required information when selecting the correct download from the developers site).

If you are asked to turn off your Data Execution Prevention for this game to run. You can create an exception so that the game will run without having to turn DEP off. Please bear in mind it’s rare that anyone even mentioned getting a DEP warning. If you are not sure how to create an exception read THIS article, which tells you how to do it.

If you are having problems unzipping the game giveaways zip file, for example getting a message saying the file is invalid try using a different file archiver such as 7-Zip, J-Zip, CAM UnZip, Hamster Free Zip Archiver, GZip, B Zip2, peazip, ZipUnzip, FreeRAR Extract Frog, RAR File Open Knife, ALZip, The Extractor, RarZilla Free Unrar

Okay, that should be enough. there are actually many more free versions available. also there are other commercial titles such as the well-known WinRAR, Stuffit, WinAce, NXPowerlite and Corel Winzip Pro, but IMO 7-Zip is probably one of the better freebies. I did purchase a copy of Stuffit when it was on sale a few years ago and recently repurchased a more up to date version when it was o offer via BitsDuJour, but didn’t like the interface for some reason, so hardly ever use it.

If you are posting requests for help late in the day I would suggest posting in the main giveaway forums in the game Game Discussion . If you’ve installed the game but it won’t work for some reason, it should still be registered, so someone may be able to help at another time. Unfortunately if your problem is actually installing it then once the giveaway period is over there’s nothing that can be done until the game is given away again (though that isn’t guaranteed. It’s always worth checking out the free games sites as sometimes the games we get here are also available for free from them as well.

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Developers rely on good feedback to improve their games. If you download this game PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE take some time once you’ve played it a while to leave some constructive feedback either positive or negative. The more constructive feedback we get, the more likely developers are to give more games away. The giveaway site already has a very good standing with search engines like Google. Developers want their products out there on the WWW, this site has the potential to do that. The game giveaway project gives away on average between 9 to 17 thousand downloads for each game depending upon what genre and how obscure the game is. That’s a lot of homes these games are being downloaded into and a lot of potential cash that’s being lost by the developers. If we get better games because of better feedback, the community are likely to continue to benefit from the generosity of the developers. Satisfied community members are then more likely to visit the home sites of those developers and purchase games that they may not have bothered with before they discovered the developer via the game giveaway site, thus giving the developers more incentives to give away more decent games to draw more users to their site. There are a lot of game sites and they all want your business. I really do think if we can improve on the quality and numbers of users leaving suitable feedback more developers will join the project. It’s a great environment to recruit beta testers as well; giving the community the opportunity to try out games that aren’t on general release yet.

Again PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE leave some suitable feedback once you’ve played the game for an hour or so. It can be positive or negative, but please explain your reasons for the feedback you post. It doesn’t need to be a dissertation, just a paragraph or two explaining what you think could improve the game and maybe what you didn’t like about the game with suggestions to replace the negative area’s. Thank you in advance to all those who take the time to post a constructive comment. It will be very much appreciated by the developer, the giveaway team and me. Thank you.

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Additional Game Information

Please Read this before downloading any of the games I’ve linked to!

Please be aware that when installing games from MyPlayCity (MPC) you do have to install a toolbar and allow your browsers home page to be changed to MyPlayCities home page. The home page can be changed back once the game has been installed and you can turn off the toolbars by going into view and selecting toolbars. A drop down menu will list all of the toolbars you may have. Just uncheck the MPC toolbar. You can delete the toolbars by finding where the executable has been installed to and deleting it then going into the registry and deleting all registry entires associated with the toolbar. If you go ahead and install any MyPlayCity games and aren’t sure what to do please post a request in the forums where either i or one of the usual regulars will help you. Personally i don’t usually post links to these gaes, but they were already posted from back when MPC was clear of such practices.

As for Gametop, I think you can still uncheck the check-boxes that ask for permission to install toolbars and change your home page, but haven’t tried installing a Gametop game for over a year, so they to may have hanged their policy. All games from these distributors will open up your browser when you close any game that you got from them. This is a totally innocuous action that has no impact on your computer apart from opening your browser. Nothing is downloaded or taken from your computer when this happens. It’s just a tool the distributors have coded into the game to take you back to their web site. Just click on the X and it’s gone with no residuals left behind.

You can get several excellent helicopter games or similar from Gametop, for example:

Desert Hawk

Incinerate

Air Assault II

Air Assault

Also there’s some online examples such as Desert Fire online, Zenon Online, Helicopter Strike Online, which you can find via the following link, just look to the bottom of the page:

http://www.gametop.com/category/action.html

You can also get some helicopter games (some of which are the same as those from Gametop and FreeGamePick) from MyPlayCity, for example:

Helicopter Wars

Airforce Missions

Helicopter Game

Air Invasion; and you can get the following games from FreeGamePick for example:

Aerial Fire

Air Shark

Air Shark 2. Finally, there are several decent helicopter browser games which can be found HERE

If you like real helicopter sim’s a great game to buy is DCS: Black shark, which can be purchased either from Steam or Direct 2 Drive. If you consider there are nearly 300 key bindings for the game you can imagine how much of a simulation the game is. There are some older Helicopter sims that you can get from abandonware sites like Abandonia such as HIND – The Russian Combat Helicopter Simulation

When I try to start the game it gives me an error: Memory access violation. Any of you got this?

………………………Moderator comment……………

Hi Dragos, One reason why a Memory Access Violation occurs is when a program attempts to use something which does not exist on the computer. It could be you are missing something essential such as a net framework or XNA framework (just quoting example, these are not quoted as being required. Maybe trye updating your graphics card drivers then try running the game again. also try downloading and reinstalling the game again.

Another reason could be a partially completed defragmentation routine. Have you recently defragged your hard drive which ahs then been interuppted? (though this would casue other prograns to crash as well)