I love big choppers.
They are so pleasurable to play around with.
There is so much you can do with a big chopper. You can swing it about in all directions, especially up and down. You can stick it virtually anywhere and deliver a big load.

Laser weapons and helicopters? Indeed, this game is big on bangs, low on realism. What we have here is an ‘almost’ vertically-scrolling blast fest where the object is to destroy absolutely everything made by the hand of man, and although this means the obliteration of typical present day ships, tanks, planes and buildings, you also have some very futuristic weaponry like plasma cannons and satellite smart bombs in your arsenal to give you an edge.

The game looks surprisingly pretty and capable for a file that is only around 25mb in size. The scrolling landscape is given a pseudo-3D effect which is smaller in the distance at the top and larger towards the bottom of the screen which makes the landscape look like it’s coming towards you. This effect also comes into play with your helicopter which scales down into the distance when you fly it to the top of the screen to give the effect of depth. But don’t be fooled by any of this nonsense because Airstrike II is a simple scrolling shooter little different in concept to any of the ancient, flat, sprite-based vertical scrollers of yore. It’s disappointing not be able to fly in different directions and to be unable to alter your true altitude is a crime. Surely this is what helicopters are all about? Blimey, we were doing free-form stuff aeons ago in the ‘Strike’ series on the Amiga the Megadrive and the Snes and even though you can change camera angles (even to make it look like a true vertical scroller) it does little to enhance matters.

Along the way you can pick up the obligatory power ups and guided missile weapons as well as smart bomb type ‘life savers’ that can be activated with the space bar. These tend to destroy everything on the screen in an incandescent wash of fire and brimstone which is delicious to behold.

Now Airstrike II provides me with a happy glow and fills that little gap of insane destruction in me better than Ready Brek mixed with nitro-glycerine, BUT… at the end of the day it’s as varied and inspiring as bagatelle. It’s easier for me to demonstrate why with the aid of this Pie Chart -

The red area denotes the time I spent simply shooting stuff and collecting new ammo and bonuses again and again.

The blue area denotes……. um……. actually that was the time spent trying to retrieve a slice of bacon and mushroom pizza which fell down the back of my computer desk. It’s a real swine when that happens…..

This could all be forgivable of course if there was a ton of variety in the landscapes and enemies but there really isn’t. Everything looks like mountainous desert terrain and shooting slight variations of tanks, APC’s and aircraft palls very quickly. Even the dreaded appearance of a few more bosses would have been welcome just to break up the flow a little. Also the three different helicopters which become available as you progress don’t really change things much. They flew and fired pretty much the same to me. Ground attack is normally real fun in flying games but here there are only a few buildings are available per level for your swooping death.

Oh yes: CHUNKYNESS. It’s a lovely word, one of my favourites in fact. I love chunky chocolate, chunky women and large chunks of chicken in my soup. What I don’t like is a chunky shoot ‘em up where there is too little room to manoeuvre on a crowded screen. It means that the game merely becomes a test of endurance where you are constantly looking for an extra life because your craft is so big that it almost automatically takes damage. Stoopid.