Interesting, playable, but could use improvement
The thing that kills this game a bit in terms of playability is the fact we aren't really given too much freedom to move around and it becomes a bit too easy to exit the dotted out of bounds box. I mean we are in an incredibly mobile helicopter and it doesn't take much to drift left or right outside of a box that is basically only barely 1.5 times the size of your helicopter. On a side note, left and right movement only seems truly useful in the very beginning to get yourself above tricky so your bullets become more likely to do damage and to push yourself back into the yellow inbounds box if you find yourself drifting out. The up and down movement portion only had the issue of not having a definite ceiling but never really negatively affected gameplay. One can actually fly out of both the gameplay level and what has been graphical limits of the level itself without much effort. (EASTER EGG OPPORTUNITY)
in a nutshell:
up and down movement >>(many times more useful than)>> left and right keys
This game could be modified to if the player is given the illusion of movement through a side-scrolling background (think Madness 6 (antipathy) the train scene for this one) - this could also be used if you want the player to be controlling tricky pursuing Stanford and Deimos without killing everyone's resource specs trying to play it.
The instructions for gameplay did help out quite a bit, but could use a graphical depiction of what one's hitbox and out of bounds box are.
I really really do want to see a sequel grow out of this game though. The music was great. The art was pretty spot on and well done and the basic gameplay was enjoyable once you picked up on what part of the helicopter actually needs to stay inside the bounds.
Happy Madness Day! Hope to see more from and of you~