RC Helicopter is a flight simulator game where players use 1 of 3 different controlling remote-controlled helicopters to complete chores and other jobs in their town.
RC Helicopter contains examples of:
- Always Night: The aptly named Night Pool, Night Lab, and Night Music stages.
- Animal Theme Naming: The 3 helicopters that the player can use: Sky Cat, Sky Bear, and Sky Fox.
- Anti-Frustration Features: If the player gets stuck on a level and keeps losing money, they can replay an earlier level as many times as needed in order to gain enough money to buy upgrades and/or a better helicopter.
- Bonus Stages: The player unlocks two more stages after finishing the main game. These are Mountain, where the player shoots a water gun at balloons, and Extra, where they shoot water at miniature UFOs. The player also has infinite battery and HP like in Training.
- "Blind Idiot" Translation: The game is full of awkward sentences like "Your challenge is failing" after the player fails a level, or the girl the player meets during the nighttime school levels describing the ghosts as "funny".
- Bottomless Fuel Tanks: Averted. Copters operate on batteries, which gradually drain over time until they're depleted, at which point the player will fail the level. On top of that, the player is forced to pay for any battery depletion that happened during the level.
- Bottomless Magazines: Also averted with the water gun, which drains the batteries of the helicopter.
- Collision Damage: Hitting most objects with rotors of a copter will damage it.
- Covers Always Lie: Players never get to use the copter on the front cover.
- Crippling Overspecialization: The Sky Fox is the most mobile of the three copters... too mobile. It's extremely easy to lose control of and damage from hitting objects.
- Critical Annoyance: The battery meter and/or the HP bar will quickly flash red and white if either of them get too low.
- Critical Existence Failure: Helicopters will control just fine until they take their final hit, where they will immediately break down and the player will have to retry the level.
- Guns Are Worthless: Averted with the water gun. It shoots rapidly and works well at hitting the crows in the Beakly level and popping Balloons in the Mountain level.
- Life Meter: All 3 helicopters start off with 5 hit points and they will break once they lose all of them. The player can buy body upgrades, upping the hit points to 11.
- No Name Given: Exaggerated. Out of the 13 characters in the game, including the player character and their parents (who speak but aren’t shown), only Mark and Beakly are named (even then, it’s unclear if Beakly is the name of the woman or her shop… or both).
- Ramming Always Works: Downplayed. Players can pop the balloons in Mountain with their rotor blades, although it's more practical to shoot them with the water gun.
- Remixed Level: Empty Land is reused for Extra, the final bonus stage.
- Rule of Three:
- The 3 copters are the Sky Cat, which has average handling, the Sky Bear, which is slow but easy to control, and the Sky Fox, which is fast but hard to control.
- As mentioned above, there are 3 night missions.
- The final three missions in the main game have the player take pictures of ghosts at nighttime at school.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Empty Land has the player pick up aluminum cans from a square of empty land and place them in a trash can… or they can just drop them into the street. The game even counts it as getting it into the can.
- Timed Mission: Exaggerated. 9 out of the 12 missions are timed in that the player’s helicopter has a limited battery life. This can be extended for each helicopter by buying longer-lasting batteries.
