Tiger Heli

Developer: Micronics     Publisher: Acclaim     Released: 1987     Genre: Shooter

One day I will learn why so many NES publishers turned to Micronics to develop Nintendo ports of their arcade games. You would think after seeing the sorry state of their various hack jobs that they would run screaming. But somehow they kept getting work. They took the hatchet to many an arcade classic; Ghosts n’ Goblins, Ikari Warriors, 1942, the list goes on and on. Tiger Heli is not one of those games. Not the arcade game, the NES port. Make no mistake, Tiger Heli on the NES is bad and should be avoided.

The titular Tiger Heli you pilot is allegedly the result of a billion dollar initiative. I question if all that money went to the chopper but I’ll get to that later. When compared to the majority of shooters that send one lone ship to deal with an invading force it actually seems plausible here. The country of Cantun has been overrun by terrorists. To combat this threat the government pools their resources to create the Tiger Heli and sends it in. These have to be the lamest terrorists around as they have little air cavalry. Their ground support is strong but you can see why one attack chopper is enough.

There is no point talking around it; Tiger Heli is one of the most embarrassing NES titles from a technical perspective. The frame rate is simply atrocious, giving the entire game a sluggish feel. The game runs slow as is but as soon as a few explosions and enemies appear it actually becomes worse. But there is more! Tiger Heli has some of the worst flickering I’ve seen in any game ever. If you use a bomb half the enemies on screen disappear. Mind you, it is not because they were destroyed, it is to somehow maintain performance. Why the game is such a technical mess, I don’t know. In the arcade Tiger Heli was a bit spartan which makes the game’s performance here baffling.  It’s not the system; Gun Nac and the Guardian Legend have far more going on and don’t slow down. Chalk it up to incompetence.

If for some reason you aren’t turned off Tiger Heli does not have much to offer gameplay wise. There are very few power-ups and they function differently than in similar titles. You have a choice between two drones/options; white drone’s fire vertically while red are horizontal. These attach to your ship and it is possible to mix and match depending on the situation. Bombs are the most frequent power-up but don’t clear the screen. These are cluster bombs that set off a series of smaller explosions. You don’t get a shield but you do have two tanks attached to your wings. If shot they explode and take out anyone in the vicinity. Pretty cool.

I can appreciate the effort in trying to be different with weapons. But in this case it doesn’t really work. Your bombs only function in close proximity which kind of defeats their purpose. You want to take out targets before they reach you, not fly up to them. My other issue is with the drones. Drones can be destroyed which is an interesting wrinkle but annoying in practice. The playing area is small and they stick out. You will spend more time protecting them than using them effectively.  The point of power-ups is to make you feel powerful. Here they seem like a liability.

The lackluster weapons and questionable technical performance are pretty damning. Those are reason enough to avoid Tiger Heli. But! If you still want Tiger Heli you will find that the game is incredibly short and easy. Extra lives are given out like candy and even with destructible power-ups you will rarely die. Tiger Heli has four stages that are over in fifteen minutes or less. After that the game loops, becoming more difficult with a random stage order. It never ends, so unless you are into playing for high scores there is little reason to jump in. Maybe if the game were more interesting I could see someone buying it for that reason. Embarrassingly I did not realize the game never ends when I was young. I kept looping over and over without noticing I was playing the same stages repeatedly. Don’t’ be an idiot like me.

In Closing

Honestly even if Tiger Heli did not have technical problems it still would not be worth buying. There are other shooters that do everything better, buy those instead.