Cleared Hot

A helicopter, a rope, and thirty years of memory

Cleared Hot is developer Not Knowing Corporation's nostalgic, physics-based helicopter shooter, published by MicroProse Software and entering Early Access on 20 November 2025 for Windows and Linux. Players take command of one of eight playable helicopters across a single-player campaign spanning desert, jungle and arctic biomes, shooting enemy vehicles, dodging heat-seeking missiles, and deploying a squad to capture or defend territory. The game's defining hook is a fully physics-based rope and magnet system that lets players pick up almost anything that isn't tied down, hauling tanks into position, redirecting incoming missiles, or sending enemies ragdolling through the air, turning the classic top-down helicopter-shooter formula into a playground for improvised, emergent solutions rather than a single scripted approach to each mission.

A throwback reviewers describe in deeply personal terms

The single most consistent thread running through Cleared Hot's review corpus is genuine, often deeply personal nostalgia for the classic Strike series that clearly inspired it. One of the corpus's most heavily upvoted reviews states the connection immediately: "10 minutes was all I needed to know this game is exactly like the Urban/Desert/Jungle/Nuclear/Soviet Strike games of the past and that's exactly what I wanted." That recognition recurs constantly across the corpus, but what distinguishes Cleared Hot's reception is how often reviewers frame it through specific personal memory rather than simple genre comparison: one detailed review describes watching a helicopter game through a Chinese computer shop window as a child three decades ago and finally getting to "relive this childhood dream," while another describes buying the game for their father, who has been "reliving his teen days" playing it, closing with the hope of seeing him "happy more often." A further reviewer, writing at almost 40 years old, describes finding "the same energy I felt long ago" as a 12-year-old renting Jungle Strike from a video store, crediting the game's soundtrack and gameplay specifically for triggering that recall.

Physics, rope-hauling, and mechanics reviewers call genuinely emergent

Beyond its nostalgic pull, Cleared Hot's physics-driven mechanics draw their own specific, repeated praise. One detailed review, written by a player who identifies as having helped test and advise on development, describes running the game's town-defense mission "probably a dozen times" and discovering it could be "sequence broken" by directly choplifting convoy trucks to the exit rather than following the mission's intended path, closing with "fun to move and shoot" and specific praise for the game's underlying design space. A separate detailed review independently credits the "flight mechanics" as "fluid, satisfying, and a successful modern take on the classic Strike formula," even while going on to raise concerns elsewhere in the same review about how much of that mechanical potential the current campaign actually puts to use. That combination, mechanics reviewers consistently praise paired with content some feel doesn't yet showcase them fully, recurs across much of the corpus's more detailed, considered feedback.

An expensive demo, reviewers say, until more content arrives

Set against that enthusiasm, the single most dominant and heavily repeated complaint across Cleared Hot's negative reviews concerns how much content the current Early Access build actually offers. One detailed review states the frustration directly, describing the current release as "an expensive demo, for just an (as yet) incomplete game," and recommending other players "stay away until it's finished or if it's on sale." A separate reviewer echoes the same concern about value for money even more bluntly, noting the campaign is "10 levels you'll finish in an hour" and arguing "paying them up front doesn't give them any incentive to finish," while a third detailed review describes completing "almost the entire campaign in 1.4 hours on max difficulty," specifically questioning why the developers didn't continue building out a single larger campaign rather than splitting content across many smaller, similarly structured missions.

Framerate drops, missing checkpoints, and other Early Access rough edges

A further, independently repeated complaint concerns technical performance. One detailed review describes a framerate that "generally tanks under 50 FPS most of the time" on hardware capable of running considerably more demanding titles smoothly, calling the issue "unforgivable for such a graphically basic game" and specifically requesting optimization work. A separate reviewer flags the same concern specifically for Steam Deck owners, describing performance "between 15 and 45" frames per second on a platform where "even AAA games are capable of 60FPS." A smaller, more specific complaint concerns the absence of mid-mission checkpoints, with one reviewer describing an otherwise positive impression soured by dying late into a ten-minute mission and being forced to restart entirely from the beginning, a frustration compounded, in their account, by a difficulty curve that "ramp[s] up so abruptly towards the later part of the mission."

Value

At NZ$27.99, Cleared Hot asks a moderate Early Access price for a nostalgic, physics-enhanced helicopter shooter that has already generated real emotional resonance with players who grew up on the classic Strike series, and its Overwhelmingly Positive score, 3818 positive against 149 negative across 3967 reviews, reflects genuine, often deeply personal enthusiasm for what the game gets right. That reception comes with the caveat of a dominant, heavily repeated complaint about thin current content relative to price, and an independently repeated concern about inconsistent performance, particularly on Steam Deck. For fans of the classic Strike series willing to support an Early Access release and watch it grow, Cleared Hot already delivers a genuinely moving throwback experience; for players wanting a complete, technically polished campaign on day one, the current review corpus suggests waiting for further content and optimization updates first.