The Collection Chamber: HELLFIRE ZONE

Are you ready for a wild helicopter ride? Are you prepared to confront, head on, all that the enemy can throw at you? Armed with a high performance Apache Helicopter and an assortment of lethal weaponry, you are required to venture deep behind enemy lines to rescue captures personnel.

Sounds easy? ...Think again.

Set across a wide variety of dangerous locations, HELLFIRE ZONE takes you on a pulse-racing journey of military mayhem that will have you straffing the enemy ground based targets and staring down the barrel of enemy helicopter weapons in mid-air dogfights. Launch deadly missiles of spray stinger fire and chain guns to keep the enemy off your back, while you escort the POWs home in this white-knuckle military action game of survival.
360 degree rotational viewpoint
Exciting cinematic introduction sequence and the use of SVGA graphics throughout the game
Over 30 different types of buildings and enemies to destroy including gun emplacements, F16 Fighter Bombers and ground based Infantry Units
Wide variety of battle locations including vast desert stretches and scenic mountain ranges

~ from the back of the European box

There was a brief period in the mid-90s when every publisher seemed convinced that putting the player in charge of military hardware automatically made for an exciting videogame. Hellfire Zone, released in 1995 by GameTek and developed by Panoramic Software, arrived amidst the explosive success of the Strike series. On paper, they sound similar; pilot an Apache-style helicopter, dive behind enemy lines and rescue stranded personnel while blasting tanks, fighters and gunships out of the sky. In practice, it feels less like a combat deployment and more like someone effed around with the control stick.

Visually, Hellfire Zone aims for high spectacle with a low hardware requirement. It eschews the free-roaming 3D terrain that every developer wanted to experiment with, and instead presented the world in a single forward-facing viewpoint. The helicopter hovers fixed in the foreground while enemies and scenery scale in and out along the horizon. It creates an odd halfway house between sprite-scaling arcade shooters and a combat flight game. Enemy aircraft loom out of the distance, tanks crawl beneath you and explosions burst with surprising enthusiasm for a modest DOS title. At first glance it almost looks futuristic, especially with the speed lines and exaggerated scaling effects, but the illusion collapses the moment you realise every encounter happens just a few feet in front of you. It's an unusual look that earns points for style even if it lacks any real sense of place.

Aim of the game: rescue captured allies (left) and bring them back to your base (right) without crashing.
It's harder than it looks.

The goal of each stage isn't simply to flatten everything that moves. They revolve around locating stranded military personnel hidden behind enemy lines, collecting them and transporting them to a friendly air base. Navigation works through a directional arrow system that points towards successive waypoints, changing direction as objectives are reached. Fuel is limited, damage accumulates and scavenging the battlefield for additional weapons and supplies becomes essential. Your helicopter comes armed with a rapid-fire chain gun alongside two missile types: Stinger missiles for traditional lock-and-fire attacks and Hellfire missiles that can apparently acquire targets after launch, plus defensive flares to distract incoming fire. There's a lot going on, and to the uninitiated it sounds surprisingly tactical. In reality, it mostly translates into charging from marker to marker while firing at anything vaguely hostile before the fuel gauge empties. And more often than not, it will empty before you're anywhere close to completing the mission.

There may be a lot going on when it comes to combat, but it'll be the controls you'll be wrestling with. While joystick support is present, the keyboard proves marginally more functional. Up and down arrows adjust altitude, left and right rotate the helicopter, plus and minus alter speed, Space fires weapons, Tab cycles armaments and Delete launches flares. That's all manageable until you realise movement is governed entirely by momentum and orientation. The helicopter never quite goes where you expect it to. Imagine the tank controls of classic survival horror, then imagine trying to use them in a game that expects split-second reactions while missiles, aircraft and terrain all compete to take you down in a single hit. Such character-orientated controls should have no place in such a chaotic game. You eventually adapt, but not before several entirely avoidable collisions.

Homing missiles are, in my experience, the best offense. It's impossible to accurately aim otherwise (left).

The cramped screen means that danger often appears with little warning. In-air collision is very likely (right).

Once the novelty wears off, the game quickly becomes repetitive. Enemies arrive constantly, explosions happen frequently and the same repeated objectives tick by with little variance beyond the background skybox. Crashing is alarmingly easy - sometimes because of enemy fire, sometimes to due to an in-air collision, but more often than not because you ventured to low to the ground trying to avoid the previous two. Add to that the limited fuel which punishes experimentation or exploration making for a game that is won through sheer luck or memorisation instead of any actual skill. There's fleeting fun in mowing down incoming aircraft with the chain gun or threading missiles into distant targets, but success rarely feels earned and failure rarely feels meaningful.

That leaves Hellfire Zone in an awkward place. There's enough here to enjoy for a short session with nice visuals and an uncomplicated objective loop making for entertaining blast of arcade energy, but I doubt many would add another 50p into the coin slot. Not a total disaster - though it does come dangerously close to one - just a loud, awkward little helicopter game that never quite escapes its own blast radius.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox-X build of DOSBox to bring the game to modern systems. Manual included. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 11.

File Size: 34.5 Mb. Install Size: 74.0 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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