I was kind of expecting Heliborne to be just another live service game, a sort of Helicopter-based World of Tanks clone, but there's a bit more to it than that.
Controls-wise I found Heliborne to be a weird one. Having the Left Trigger set as "Climb" and Right Trigger as "Climb Down" (lose altitude) seemed wrong, fortunately swapping them is expected by the developer and easy to do in the options. I also turned the camera sensitivity up as everything felt sluggish-which improved things only slightly.
The slow controls make Heliborne a strange one to pigeonhole. It's too hard and repetitive to be a good arcade game, and not detailed or realistic enough to be considered as a sim–for instance, there's no cockpit view.
A substantial single player campaign is also playable in co-op, and there's also a surprisingly decent online multiplayer for 2-10 players-but good luck finding that many. My main problem is that even a campaign feels like an online match, although you only compete against AI bots, there's no narrative to make it feel like a proper single-player campaign.
For the most part the maps have clear objectives, but we have loaded into games where nothing seems to be working as it should (you may spawn off an enemy ship, there’s nothing to destroy and your troops don't want to deploy and capture anything.) When things are working you press ‘A’ to pick up soldiers and evac them, and ‘B’ to deploy soldiers or drop cargo. ‘X’ drops flares or changes helicopters if you're at your home base. ‘RB’ fires the selected weapon, and the D-pad is busy too, "up" is weapon type, left & right change weapon modes and down reloads the selected gun, missiles or rockets.
It really doesn't matter which helicopter you use or which era you play in, they're all incredibly susceptible to enemy fire. The enemies rarely miss, and the sluggish handling means it's hard to avoid incoming fire even if you know where it's coming from, and spotting enemies is quite hard too. All helicopters have flares, but they only help with ground to air missiles, and a couple of well-hidden soldiers can swiftly bring your aircraft crashing to the ground in flames with just rifle or machine gun fire.
Theatres you can play in include Vietnam, North Africa, Afghanistan, the Balkans and the fictional (unless you're former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Hailey) Binomo Islands, with helis from the USSR or the USA.
Heliborne looks decent, as long as you don't look too close or expect a great deal of detail on anything other than the helicopters themselves, and it moves smoothly (if slowly) on our PS5. I was kind-of hoping for a Xbox X/S or PS5 "World of Tanks for helicopters," or a helicopter-centric War Thunder, but even allowing for its age (it came out nearly 7 years ago on PC) its solo campaign mode and budget price of £24.99 it's not as good as either of those popular LSGs (Live Service Games), and I don't think it'll have a fraction of their initial appeal or longevity.
Thanks to Klabater and PressEngine