Flying a Helicopter Is 2026’s Most Stressful Gaming Experience

2026 has been stuffed with annoying moments in video video games. Operating away from an enormous, flabby monster as Grace Ashcroft in Resident Evil Requiem. Combating Damien Webb within the sewers in 007 First Light. Dropping your grip on the ultimate handhold of a cliff face in Cairn. However none of these come near the nerve-wracking expertise of piloting a helicopter in Wardogs.

You’d assume flying a helicopter in a online game could be simple, particularly in a first-person shooter the place its important function is to get you to the battlefield. I’ve flown many a chopper in Grand Theft Auto 5, a good few within the Battlefield collection, to not point out a bunch within the Simply Trigger video games. However Wardogs is completely different.

Firstly, Kane Allard, a senior producer at Bulkhead, instructed me in an interview performed at Gamescom 2026 that the helicopters in Wardogs have been designed by an aeronautical engineer. “A giant a part of the sport is automobiles, and we needed them to really feel as real looking and genuine as attainable,” Allard defined. “The best way we achieved that was by bringing in an aeronautical engineer to design the bottom layer of our helicopters, simply to make them really feel real looking and provides them weight and make them really feel enjoyable. And it offers them that ability degree the place you may be taught and turn into a greater pilot.”

No marvel they’re so rattling finicky. I am pretty able to ferrying allies to the battlefield now, after spending some time training within the firing vary (to the purpose the place I wrote Polygon’s information on how to fly in Wardogs). However at first, flying was a nightmare. Nicely, extra particularly: touchdown was a nightmare. Maintaining the chicken within the air was doable, however coming to a cease shortly, effectively, and safely, whereas permitting passengers to disembark, proved to be the troubling half.

It is not simply the act of piloting the helicopter that’s annoying; it is the data that in case you crash, you’ve got wasted the $6,250 you’ve got spent on the automobile and killed each passenger who trusted you to get them to the motion safely. If one other teammate would not come alongside to revive everybody — and it is often unlikely, until you’ve got crashed contained in the management zone — then the kits of all of your passengers have additionally gone to waste, for a collective loss in the tens of thousands. After that, no person goes to belief you to pilot a helicopter once more, so you will want to take a seat as a passenger on another person’s chopper along with your tail between your legs.

Some pilots deal with flying as an artwork, equivalent to Instagram user designatedpilot. For me, nevertheless, simply getting my passengers to the management zone protected and sound is sufficient, and even then, I typically do not fancy the strain. I am going to follow driving a land automobile until I would like an elevated coronary heart price.