By Alex Connolly @ The Wargamer
Heliborne has officially hit Steam Early Access. With the latest patch, I felt it was time to drop the collective, putting skid to pad to see what’s going on with JetCat Games’ tilt for World of Flying Tanks.
Though enthralled by my time in the pre-alpha, the then-minuscule player population offered a sporadic glimpse at what Heliborne was selling. Freshly deployed and on active duty in Early Access, population boom across the three-strong servers – EU, US Central and SE Asia/Oceania, at the time of writing – makes the ten bone purchase argument far more convincing. A full-blown Heliborne match, with its unique sense of territory control, speaks for itself.
If you’re chasing a more detailed look at just what Heliborne is, do have a goosey at our pre-alpha coverage. In a nutshell, this is an excellent use of the modern “World of [insert romantic hardware]“, and perhaps one of the more nuanced of its ilk. Featuring a simucade feel, aiming to capture the revolutionary flexibility and fragility of the war whirlybird, Heliborne is as much a ground game as it is one of the air. It has an intimacy where others don’t. Each sortie an exercise in grazing ridgelines and hugging rivers; dancing between the snarl of AA tracers and coming in hot under rocketry to snatch bases with a bellyload of troops.
