Hijong Park's Defender Patrol

Yes I know this is a long review, but it might be worth reading to get a decent idea of what it's actually like to play this game. This game is shockingly good. Essentially, it's a minimalist combat flight simulator focused on piloting a single Cold War-era helicopter, presented in charming 90's flight sim-inspired retro visuals with a fully interactive cockpit. Best of all, it has fantastic VR support, which means you can control everything in the cockpit in an intuitive/immersive manner, just like VTOL VR. It's also fully playable on a monitor with mouse + keyboard, HOTAS, or gamepad; I briefly tried flying with my gamepad and controlling the helicopter still felt great. The controls are fairly complicated and I had to assign everything on the gamepad manually, so it will probably take some experimenting to find a setup that feels intuitive. But in VR, the default controls and settings felt great. [h1]Is it a hardcore sim?[/h1] Just how "hardcore" the flight simulation feels will depend on your experience with other flight sims; if you play high-level combat sims like DCS (I don't), acclimating to this game should be a breeze. If you haven't played any flight sims before, this …

[h2]The best rotary wing simulation on the market[/h2] Defender Patrol is a labor of love creation from a solo developer that seems to capture and implement lessons learned from other flight simulations with exceptional care. [h2]Endless Replayability[/h2]The randomly generated terrain and randomization of missions/objectives in Defender Patrol is incredible and adds endless replayability. I love that players can throttle the environment, terrain, and mission variables to create their own desired experience. No two mission ever feel the same. [h2]Systems Modelling[/h2]I find that Defender Patrol has the best systems modelling in any flight sim that I've played. It has a fantastic balance of abstraction and realism in how it models and presents systems to the player. A fully clickable cockpit exists for those that enjoy that sort of thing, but everything can also be keymapped for ease of access. All of the systems are easy to learn, easy to keymap, and easy to employ during missions. I think this sort of thing is a challenge for many developers - finding a balance in total realism and abstraction and I think Defender Patrol does it better than most games. [h2]Accessibility[/h2]…

Hidden gem

I'm very picky with my simulator games. This game however gives me nostalgia for some of the older sim games i used to play. The support for VR is a nice touch as well. It's not too overly complicated and the training missions to a great job explaining how everything in the cockpit works. My only complaint with the game is that when you launch it for the first time you get a "first time launch preset selection" screen that I assume presets your controls and key bindings to a specific set up based on the options you select. after that though there's no option to run it again if you accidentally pick an option you didn't mean to. Having the option to run this preset questionnaire again in the settings menu would be a great. Anyway, if you're looking for a helicopter flight sim, this is pretty great. Looking forward to their next one where you pilot a Cobra Gunship.

incredibly fun, the perfect level of detailed simulation. i can't wait for low level hunters to come out :)

This is a well put together, semi-realistic helicopter fight sim. Although it is more of a tech demo than a game, it have not hindered me to have a lot of fun in this game. It has tutorials that explains everything very well and once you understand everything it is very simple, further it has a good mission creator which allows for near endless replayability, with different settings to customize the difficulty of the game. The gameplay is nice and the developer (shoutout to hijong park) is wonderful .It also runs very well on my ♥♥♥♥♥♥ laptop despite being somewhat poorly optimized. I love it, very reccomended