Flying a Helicopter Is 2026’s Most Stressful Gaming Experience

2026 has been full of stressful moments in video games. Running away from a huge, flabby monster as Grace Ashcroft in Resident Evil Requiem. Fighting Damien Webb in the sewers in 007 First Light. Losing your grip on the final handhold of a cliff face in Cairn. But none of those come close to the nerve-wracking experience of piloting a helicopter in Wardogs.

You’d think flying a helicopter in a video game would be easy, especially in a first-person shooter where its main purpose is to get you to the battlefield. I’ve flown many a chopper in Grand Theft Auto 5, a fair few in the Battlefield series, not to mention a bunch in the Just Cause games. But Wardogs is different.

First and foremost, Kane Allard, a senior producer at Bulkhead, told me in an interview conducted at Gamescom 2026 that the helicopters in Wardogs were designed by an aeronautical engineer. “A big part of the game is vehicles, and we wanted them to feel as realistic and authentic as possible,” Allard explained. “The way we achieved that was by bringing in an aeronautical engineer to design the base layer of our helicopters, just to make them feel realistic and give them weight and make them feel fun. And it gives them that skill level where you can learn and become a better pilot.”

No wonder they’re so damn finicky. I’m fairly capable of ferrying allies to the battlefield now, after spending a while practicing in the firing range (to the point where I wrote Polygon’s guide on how to fly in Wardogs). But at first, flying was a nightmare. Well, more specifically: landing was a nightmare. Keeping the bird in the air was doable, but coming to a stop quickly, efficiently, and safely, while allowing passengers to disembark, proved to be the troubling part.

It isn’t just the act of piloting the helicopter that is stressful; it’s the knowledge that if you crash, you’ve wasted the $6,250 you’ve spent on the vehicle and killed every passenger who trusted you to get them to the action safely. If another teammate doesn’t come along to revive everyone — and it’s usually unlikely, unless you’ve crashed inside the control zone — then the kits of all your passengers have also gone to waste, for a collective loss in the tens of thousands. After that, nobody is going to trust you to pilot a helicopter again, so you’ll need to sit as a passenger on someone else’s chopper with your tail between your legs.

Some pilots treat flying as an art, such as Instagram user designatedpilot. For me, however, just getting my passengers to the control zone safe and sound is enough, and even then, I often don’t fancy the pressure. I’ll stick to driving a land vehicle unless I need an increased heart rate.