Attack Helicopter Dating Simulator – Review

Ye.. no. How many dating simulators can one handle? Come on man, we already had Dream Daddy, a dad dating simulator, and it kept getting weirder. Purrfect Date, the cat dating simulator. Hatoful Boyfriend, the pigeon dating simulator. Where does it end? Well, it doesn’t seem like it will ever end at all. At some point, the internet started making fun of the many genders that people can identify with nowadays, and the meme ”I identify as an Apache attack helicopter” was born. This specific dating simulator seems to focus on that as you will date.. surprisingly accurately portrayed attack helicopters. 

Story

Starting off your Attack Helicopter Dating Simulator experience, you get to choose your name and your gender (spoiler, you can only choose attack helicopter), and off you go into the weird world of attack helicopter dating. This entire game is focussed on its story so it plays more like a visual novel than as a dating simulator. It will take you about two hours to get through the story, not taking into account that you could maybe redo the game to get a different ending. When you are ready and set to fly, you will find that the story begins at the Attack Helicopter Academy, a place for you to study and grow in the art of becoming a proper attack helicopter. Your classmate helicopters seem to be all female helicopters. The background and the helicopter you interact with will change as classic visual novels do, but that’s all there is to the way the story is being told. Who knows what will happen on a school full of hard-working, sweaty helicopters…

Graphics

Even though the game has a feel to it of ”this is what happens when you take a joke too seriously” in terms of production quality and effort, the graphics are not done that great. What’s good about it is the details of the helicopters and the girls that come to represent them. Yes, standing next to the text lines, a girl will be shown that is supposed to give the helicopter more character but is not physically there, making it feel a bit more like a classic dating sim. Unless the game is literally about girls identifying as helicopters, but let’s not make this too complicated. What’s made pretty poorly though are the clear stock photos in the background with a photoshop filter on them, but let’s not compare an elaborate joke to a serious dating simulator or visual novel and take it for what it is.

Sound

The only sounds in the game are different types of background music. These, like the visual background drops, feel cheap and are being rehashed a lot of the time. What’s done well about them is the comedic timing with which they are being delivered throughout the game. As an example, what in a classic dating sim would be seen as coercing your future lover for some action, in Attack Helicopter Dating Simulator it’s called ”Going on a mission”. Since you already don’t know what to expect in a game like this, going on a mission and that being followed up with some bow-chicka-wow-wow music says all there is to say.

Gameplay

So, Attack Helicopter Dating Simulator is a visual novel disguising itself as a dating sim. This means you will follow a storyline where most choices you make don’t really matter or are very limited to keep the story on the rails towards the same destinations as intended. There are some choices and some random factors that decide a few branches in the story, but overall it will stay the same. Also, you can save and load your game at any time, making it very easy to disagree with and revert back to previous decisive moments. The game has some structure in it besides being a visual novel. Every time you meet one of your female colleague helicopters you will scan them, revealing a lot of impressive specifications. It’s one of the first things the game will surprise you with. Explaining what each helicopter has on the inside such as weapons, rotary power, and armor. It will give you this information like you’re studying to become an engineer at a military school.

Surprising ”formats” like these keep the game interesting and alive. One moment you might be thinking the game is all serious with its technical information, the other moment you and a couple of other helicopters are having a fun day off at the beach and you all have to decide how to cut the only watermelon you brought cause everybody is hungry for some red, watery fruit. As you might guess from this example, Attack Helicopter Dating Simulator doesn’t take itself too seriously and that’s exactly what makes this visual novel fun and separates it from others. With moments that are simply hilariously ridiculous or that break the 4th wall for a few seconds, and this weird combination of surprises and traditional dating simulator stories involving helicopters, Attack Helicopter Dating Simulator will at least be good for a chuckle or two.

Conclusion

For what it is, an elaborate joke and visual novel, Attack Helicopter Dating Simulator does a good job to amuse you for a bit. It’s too bad there is not that much gameplay involved from an interactive point of view, and that the sounds and graphics could have been better. Yet, as it is, if you manage to pick it up for a small amount of money, because of its weird sense of humor and surprising everything, you probably won’t regret it.

Icecreamvamp

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I'm a game designer, developer, and reviewer. I've been reviewing for 3rd-strike.com since 2017.

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