Get to da chopper.
Piloting in Wardogs is brutally difficult, and that’s worth knowing before you hand over a single dollar at the vendor. The skill system in this FPS pays out for doing the work — marking enemies, patching up teammates, hauling passengers to the front. That last job is the source of pilot experience, and pilot experience is exactly what turns you into a better pilot.
Which makes the loop simple, and a little cruel. Flying is how you improve. Not crashing is how you keep flying.
Start with the little bird, not the fancy one
Right now helicopters are the sole aerial vehicle in Wardogs, and a handful of types exist. Most of them you can safely ignore.
The one you want is the MH-6: cheapest of the bunch and the most forgiving to handle. Sinking cash into the Z20 Lakota or the Havoc makes no sense until flying safely is second nature, and the weaponized AH-6 variants are a distraction — the job here is pilot first, everything else a distant second. Early on the question doesn’t even arise: until your pilot experience climbs, the MH-6 is the only chopper available to purchase.
Put the mouse down, seriously
Speaking to me at Gamescom, Wardogs senior producer Kane Allard said his advice for pilots is to drop mouse and keyboard completely and pick up a controller any time they’re in the air, because the control is much easier. I put it to the test. He’s bang on the money.
On a controller, the default layout puts yaw — the direction the helicopter is facing — on the shoulder buttons, which feels considerably more natural when ascent and descent are mapped to the triggers.
Holding the right trigger begins the collective ascent, gets the propellers spinning and eventually lifts you off the ground. In the air, you move in whichever direction you’re pointed. Pulling back on the left stick generates extra wind resistance to bleed off speed, and the left trigger brings you down — gently. Descend too quickly and the impact will be harsher than you’d expect, damaging the vehicle or wiping it out completely.
Don’t have a controller handy? Take yaw off Q and E and give it to the mouse instead. Open the controls settings, switch on “rotary vehicle mouse control,” then set “helicopter mouse swipe left/right” to yaw. Keep the up/down option mapped to pitch and your helicopter will point wherever the mouse goes. It’s entirely down to taste, so sample both and stick with whichever clicks.
Read the bar at the bottom of your screen
That strip of UI is pulling more weight than most players realise. It reports your current speed and how level you are relative to the ground. The pair of horizontal arrows flanking it drift toward the centre the more parallel you get, while the curved vertical bars indicate whether you’re gaining or losing altitude.
Combine roll with yaw when turning and the whole maneuver comes out far cleaner. Roll lives on A and D for keyboard players, or the left analog stick on a pad. Landing calls for small adjustments and nothing more — every control here is in constant conversation with every other one, so tiny inputs carry a lot of weight.
The firing range is where you earn the right to carry people
Practice before you put actual passengers in an actual match. Pick up the MH-6 from the vendor, lift off, fly around a while, set down on solid ground, and do it again.
Then start raising the difficulty yourself, because a battlefield isn’t going to gift you a flat clearing. Work on touching down on bridges, on tight roads, on slopes. Those are precisely the drop-offs you’ll be going for when the match is falling apart.
Your passengers may not wait for you to land
A good number will have bought parachutes and will leap the instant the timing suits them. Stay aware of how many soldiers are genuinely still on board, and the moment the last one has bailed, swing around for another load. Stocking parachutes in your helicopter’s inventory is an option too, letting anyone who arrived without one grab a chute in mid-air.
That said, don’t sit at spawn holding out for a full cabin. A passenger or two will do. Deliver them to the fight and head straight back, because every second you and your teammates burn standing still is a second nobody is spending trying to win.
Deliver passengers inside the hot zone and the payout climbs sharply — it hands out double the cash. Of course, it’s the hot zone, so the risk ticks up a notch too. Usually a fair trade.
Stay alert to what’s around you up there. Wardogs is reasonably lenient with treetops, which won’t shred your propellers, but clip a building or a wall and your expensive chopper is gone in seconds. And when missiles are inbound, get those flares out.
Pilot is an essential role in Wardogs. It’s also a role you can fail at loudly, with an audience. If too many of your runs end in a crash that takes your passengers with it, get back to the firing range. If it’s still happening afterwards, pick a different role.