Rotor Rescue: Choplifter Rise

Helicopter rescue war game: fly, shoot tanks and bring every hostage home. The ultimate tribute to the 1982 game, Choplifter

FLY. RESCUE. SURVIVE. The legendary 1982 helicopter rescue game "Choplifter" returns as a modern retro arcade shooter: a side-scrolling helicopter war game, rebuilt for modern mobile devices.

You are the last chopper pilot in the air. Blast open detention barracks, hover low under enemy fire, load the survivors aboard, and fly them home. Lose your helicopter or drop a hostage, and the rescue dies with them.

THE RESCUE RUN Break barrack doors open with cannon and bombs. Hover to load up to 8 hostages, 16 in Classic Mode. Then race the clock back to the landing pad: every second saved is extra score.

18 HAND-CRAFTED WAR SECTORS Rolling dunes, salt flats, monsoon ridges, iron quarries, ice crevasses, obsidian spires, storm corridors, gravity vortices, mountain interiors and underground tunnels. Every sector of this helicopter war game brings its own terrain, weather and tactical twist. Sector 18, TERMINUS: a rising coolant flood drowns the lower cells, Sentinel pylons track your chopper with beams, and the shielded Architect stays invulnerable until you destroy its three orbiting nodes. Few pilots ever clear it.

LAST BIRD FLYING - ENDLESS SURVIVAL MODE Unlocked once you finish the campaign. One helicopter, one life, no resets, no safety net. Endless waves roll in. Enemies multiply, the clock tightens with every wave, and enemy aggression ramps up with no upper limit. Terrain rotates through the full sector pool, mountain interior and underground tunnels included, so no two survival runs read the same. Abort a run and your progress holds: you resume from the wave after the last one you cleared. Only the dedicated Restart Run button sends you back to Wave 1. How long can you keep the last bird flying?

KILL 'EM ALL - EXTERMINATION SORTIE Also unlocked after the campaign. One massive open arena holding every hostile type in the game at once, for players who want pure shooting. No civilians to protect. No timer counting down. The clock counts up instead, and the sortie ends only when the last enemy stops moving. Non-stop helicopter combat: shoot tanks, jets, flak nests, drones, mines, gunboats and pylons in the same airspace. Your completion time is the record, and the only way to beat it is to shoot cleaner and fly tighter.

ENEMY ROSTER T-90 Anvil tanks, MiG Shrike jet interceptors, ZS-4 flak nests, homing Wasp drones, floating mines, PK-6 Stingray gunboats, SP-9 Sentinel pylons, the Warden heavy gunship and the shielded Architect. All documented in the in-game Field Codex.

WEAPONS AND PICKUPS Manage your cannon, an 18-bomb bay and flare cartridges. Downed enemies drop canisters: Afterburner (+45% speed), Rapid Fire (2x fire rate), AP Rounds (one-shot kills), Shield segments, bomb reloads and health kits.

FOUR DIFFICULTY TIERS CADET 6 lives at 0.7x score, PILOT 5 at 1x, ACE 4 at 1.5x, LEGEND 3 at 2x. Enemy aggression, armour and clock all shift with the tier.

42 COMMENDATIONS AND A PERMANENT FLIGHT RECORD Perfect Extraction. Warden Slayer. Untouched. Iron Nerve. Campaign Closed. Your Flight Record keeps per-sector best scores, total souls rescued and every campaign completed.

CHOPLIFTER CLASSIC MODE A faithful retro recreation of the 1982 Apple II original: true 280x192 pixel geometry, four huts, 64 hostages, T-62 tanks, MiG scrambles and a 480-second timer. Old-school 2D arcade shooting, exactly as retro gamers remember it.

GRAPHICS AND AUDIO The renderer adapts to your device: MAXIMUM for full bloom, lens dispersion, water reflections and caustics, or BALANCED for a smooth framerate through explosions and weather. Generative stereo audio gives every sector its own key, tempo and instrumentation. 20 helicopter liveries to fly in.

CONTROLS Virtual stick plus FIRE, FLARE and BOMB pads. Haptic feedback on impact. Headphones recommended.

ROTOR RESCUE is a love letter to the 1982 classic, for every chopper pilot who never left a soul behind. Bring them all home.