So I'm about 60 or 70% through the game at this point.
It's pretty decent as an arcade-y space shooter. It's no where near as technical as, say, Tie Fighter or Freespace 2. There's not a lot to the game besides what you'd expect out of a console game (a couple different ships and weapon variants, upgrades you unlock by doing secondary objectives in the missions.) The beginning of the game was quite easy, but after the 4th or 5th mission it starts placing some difficult demands on you. Getting certain optional objectives (for ship upgrades) or just the sheer amount of stuff thrown at you in the course of a mission starts to get a little crazy. It's at its easiest when you're not on faced with time sensitive objectives, and can methodically boost out of combat at high speed when your shields run out, then swoop back in a few seconds later. When you've got bomber squadrons to protect, a cruiser or you're attacking a capital ship on a very tight deadline, the game starts to get frantic. Luckily when you restart a checkpoint it refills your armor and weapons.
It's pretty polished and handles decently, which is good because there's not a lot to the game. There's no multiplayer, nor does it seem like there's any kind of sandbox or wave mode. Just the story mode. The story is....well it's pretty bland to be honest. The voice overs are wooden and formulaic. Which makes the actiony, japanese pop soundtrack seem a little out of place, or tacky. That said, the game does look pretty nice and when you step back to watch a giant fleet battle, it's quite a spectacle, with flak exploding everywhere, capital ship beams cutting through the fight, and fighters zipping everywhere.
The Strike Suit is, so far, mostly a gimmick. Out of the 6 or 7 missions I've played, I've only been able to use the Strike Suit/Ship in 4. Other times they've stuck me in a non-transforming interceptor, or a bomber. You have to play several levels before they even give it to you. For a game that defines itself by the Strike Suit, its pointless absences are puzzling. And to be honest, it doesn't even really add that much to the game. And your ability to use it in missions is regulated by a bar that expends itself every time you fire the Suit's weapons. So you get about 30 or 40 seconds of floating around as the mech before you're dropped back into ship form and have to go shoot more d00ds to get more thing. It's like, can't you just let me play the freaking mech already? And when you do play the mech, you realize its real feature is an lock-on targeting system that will keep the suit pointed at its target, and acquire a new target as soon as the old one dies. You just transform, lock on, and start shooting until you run out of things in range of your weapons. You can fly into a swarm of fighters, transform, and kill 5 or 6 in the time it would take you to kill 2 in interceptor mode.
For all my negative comments I'm still generally enjoying it, even if it's a little brainless.
If you enjoy space fighting games this one isn't too bad. The dog fighting and epic scale of the action is pretty satisfying. It's not very deep but its visually and technically well put together, and it's way lighter on the mecha than it leads you to believe. If you're looking for a real balls to the wall mecha or space fighting sim, this isn't that game. While fun it has the feel of a light weight game, and whether that's worth $20 is up to you.
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Topic: Strike Suit Zero - Space Fighting Mecha - It's out (Read 4849 times)