Heli Rescue

Where do you draw the line when it comes to line-drawing games?

Flight Control was the original, with Harbor Master the first to successfully clone the mechanic thanks to a new theme. Both have been massively successful and spawned countless imitators.

You could call Heli Rescue second-generation line-drawing game. It possesses enough of a twist, though, that it can be credited with bringing something new to the party. Its trick is that it splits the reason you're drawing lines with the mechanism for continuing play and scoring points.

In Flight Control and Harbor Master, for example, the planes and the boats are the resource and the vehicle. Okay, there are some complications in terms of different coloured cargo and where you can land various types of planes, but these are minor.

In Heli Rescue, you have the helipads where you land and refuel, different types of helicopters, and various groups of people who need to be rescued. The people are a timed-based resource, too, so the game will only continue for as long as no person has been waiting a set time for rescue.

Think of it as Flight Control meets Diner Dash.

In this way, the real stars are the helicopters. The game only ships with three levels and on each you're in control of a different combination of heli types. There's the fast one-seater, the average two-seater, and the slow, four-seater, which constantly needs to be refueled.

These also provide you with a good variety in terms of how you can play the game. For example, the one-seater is great as an emergency measure. Whenever you have a single group of red flashing evacuees, you can probably shuttle them to safely in time. The larger capacity helis have to be used with more forethought, however.

Combined in this way, you end up with more time to make decisions, and that time has to be strategically spent. The threat of helis colliding in mid-air is a minor one, trumped by concern for too many groups of desperate evacuees needing rescue. Figuring out how to rescue these red-flashing groups is the real challenge.

Throw in the ability to email challenges to people and an online leaderboard, and that's Heli Rescue. Of course, it could be better. It doesn't have anything like Flight Control's graphical polish, and it should have been released with more levels, as well as better social networking options.

It earns its status, though, alongside the likes of Harbor Master and DrawRace as a line drawing game that's worth your time and 99c/€0.79/59p, even if it's not a complete original.