Hey, remember Choplifter from the 80s? Remember how simple and fun it was? Remember how pretty much anyone could just jump in and start Chopliftin'? Yeah, forget about all that. InXile Entertainment has taken all of the great things you remember about this long missing action gem and turned it into something new -- but remember, that doesn't always mean better. The new HD version of Choplifter may have a fresh coat of fancy new paint, but it's a sloppy, repetitive mess of a game that you're sure to bore of long before you're done escorting survivors.

If you remember the old Choplifter, you're bound to feel right at home as soon as you boot up the HD version. For those of you too young to remember, here's a quick primer; you're an elite helicopter pilot and your sole job is to swoop in, rescue survivors and then navigate through battlefields filled with gunfire and traps to get them to safety. Seems easy right? Keep in mind that the game is filled with enemies -- and they're the least of your worries. You'll also have to monitor your chopper's fuel level, and navigate your way to the fuel depots throughout each level. What results is a frantic attempt to memorize patterns and find the quickest route to getting the best rating for each level.

"...you'll start to notice how uneven the game truly is."

Things start off great, and things are easy to jump in to, it's when you get into the game's later missions that you'll start to notice how uneven the game truly is. As you progress, the screen will start to fill up with a lot more enemies that shoot faster and more effectively. Your pilot was apparently never made aware of this, and your ship can't seem to handle it. You can never seem to maneuver out of the way fast enough and your guns can never react fast enough to take out the quicker enemies. As a result, you're constantly taking on unnecessary damage, which of course stops you from gaining better ratings from each level. It's an infuriating process, and you're likely to break your controller more than once in the process.

As you progress through the game, you'll unlock more ships, which does make some of the game's tougher sections a bit easier, but even with the game's most impressive machines, you're still faced with a number of repetitive problems. On top of that, the game takes some serious cheap shots. Common sense says that your best bet is to clear out an area the best you can before you pick up your survivors (mostly on the count of the fact that the survivors themselves move so slowly it hurts). It's so frustrating then that when you finally do that, one random tank will simply stroll up and start ruining things for you. You're constantly having to load a few, shoot randomly popping up tanks, load a few...you get the point.

"Choplifter HD's upgraded visuals aren't really anything spectacular..."

Choplifter HD's upgraded visuals aren't really anything spectacular, they're merely passable. While the environments are rather bland, there are enough of them to keep you interested, and it's interesting to go from urban cityscape to jungle. The visual style though does have a certain Saturday Morning Cartoon feel to it, which is really cool for this G.I. Joe type game. The worst part though is that the game's dialogue does it's best to be witty and funny, but it incredibly painful to listen to. The developers seemingly just took a bunch of jokes and clichés from old action movies and threw them in.

We live in a society where bigger is always better -- where more is always the answer. Choplifter HD is the perfect example of why sometimes..it's okay to be simple. The developers took a long established (though admittedly forgotten) formula and added modern flash and mechanics to create a sloppy, boring mess. It's fun for about an hour, then you should start searching out for the ROMs of the original.