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Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut
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Graphics & Sound:
Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut is beautiful to look at, with overly saturated colors and blurring effects used to give a feeling of motion. Some of the star field backdrops are breathtakingly beautiful. However, you won't often have the luxury of taking in the sights, as you're in over your head with enemies hellbent on your destruction.
You can choose from third-person or first-person view while piloting your fighter. Personally, I prefer the "out-the-window" view that places you in the cockpit. It always seems to be that the third-person view makes aiming more difficult in flight-based games.
Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut Trailer
One noteworthy aspect of Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut is the soundtrack; it has almost a Middle Eastern sound to it, contributing to an alien or otherworldly feel. In fact, every time my wife walked through the room, she would ask what the heck I was playing. It is a rather odd selection for a game, but it works well.
The voicework is well done, but for the most part, serves to advance the story. There are, of course, some pertinent bits of information given from time to time, when they inform you that the enemy is changing targets or gives a tactical mission update mid-fight.
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Gameplay:
Earth is threatened by a deadly enemy and its only hope is the ultimate combination of bleeding edge prototype fighter star-ship and a maverick fighter pilot with mad skills. They've got the prototype; can you pilot it to victory and save the Earth?
You're the hot-shot rookie pilot destined to save Earth. (Or so we all hope.) Strike Suit Zero can be played in first or third person, and you'll get to fly around and shoot at things, but you'll have to manage acceleration, pitch, roll, yaw, targeting, weapons and a jamming system to protect you from missiles. Oh, and you'll need to balance speed with control; if you want to actually be able to keep an enemy fighter in your sights, you'll need to slow down, so your turns will be more spinning-around-in-one-spot and less long-arching-turns. There are space shooters that gamers can just jump in and play, turning their minds off a bit and just shooting everything that moves. This is not one of those games.
The game is named after the "Strike Suit" - a new prototype fighter that can assume two different forms: one patterned after normal fighters and one that is more of a mechanized fighting suit the size of a fighter. (Think "space ship that transforms into a mech-ish sort of thing.") You won't start off in the Strike Suit, you'll start off in a typical fighter and you'll have to prove yourself before you get your hands on (and your butt in) such advanced hardware. Once you do, however, if you're like me, you may find yourself to be quite fond of the Strike Suit form. Possibly my favorite feature of this mode is the ability to easily 'strafe' an enemy by double-tapping in a given direction. This, combined with the ability to auto-select your next target, can lead to very satisfying stints of selecting a target, launching a few shots at it, then switching to your next target before it even finishes off the first target, with that "yeah, but he's dead and he just doesn't know it" smirk slowly forming on your lips.
Those familiar with Strike Suit Zero, perhaps from the PC version, will notice that the story has been massaged a bit, to get you in the seat of a Strike Suit earlier. Additionally, the Director's Cut includes the Heroes of the Fleet DLC, which allows players to jump into a simulation of specific pivotal battles of the U.N.E./Colonial War, as well as the Marauder and Raptor Strike Suits, which were made available as DLC for the PC version. All of that, together with improvements based on feedback from the PC players, has been worked into what Born Ready Games describes as "the definitive version of the game".
All told, you'll have a total of 18 different missions to play through - 13 from the Original Campaign and 5 from the Heroes of the Fleet Campaign. While that might not sound like a lot, I should stress that the missions, themselves, are composed of several smaller objectives, often separated by certain key events, which, in and of themselves, are sometimes pivotal to the mission. As an example, one part of a mission may involve protecting a capital ship long enough for them to complete repairs and bring their weapons online. Once you've done that, they can fend for themselves and you may be tasked with some other objective. In another mission, you find yourself taking part in a multi-stage strategy to taunt the enemy, draw them out, then lead them into an ambush and finish them off. Each of these stages is a different objective, with the completion of each objective being its own checkpoint (thank Heaven for checkpoints!) and each objective leading up to the next one. |
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Difficulty:
There are three difficulty levels in Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut, to allow players to adjust the challenge to suit them. I found that one of the larger difficulties in the game, however, were the controls (more below). Once I had managed to train my thumbs not to fight each other for control of my ship's pitch, things were a lot better, but the difficulty of the controls aren't limited to analog sticks. The special "Strike Suit" fighter, which the game is named after, has two different modes and in "Strike" Mode, some of the controls work radically differently than in the Fighter Mode. One blatant example is the Strike Mode's ability to strafe around a selected target. When the Strike Mode energy runs out and you are automatically shunted back into Fighter Mode, you lose that ability, mid-strafe. One that has bitten me more times than I can count is the fact that, while in Strike Mode, you can basically hang motionless in space, a certain distance from a target and, by using (L2), you can back away from the target. In Fighter Mode, however, you are always moving forward and (L2) merely slows your forward speed, rather than making you go backwards. If you hang around with a target right in front of you and you get shunted back into Fighter Mode, you will start moving towards it, unexpectedly. More than once, I have done reasonably well in part of a mission, only to have this happen and run into an object when my shields were not yet built back up and... that's all she wrote.
If I was to offer a tip for playing Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut, it would have to be to actually pay attention to the briefings and communication from your team. Understand what you're being told to do, because no matter how many enemy fighters you're blasting out of the sky - if your current mission is to prevent missiles from destroying a large ship and you fail to do that, the mission is a failure. And, typically, when the mission fails, you have to try again. Only rarely do you lose a ship you're supposed to protect and get to keep limping along with that mission. However, once you know what needs to be done, you'll want to use common sense to determine how to carry out your orders. If you're flying from one target to another and fighters make the mistake of crossing your flight path, you may want to take the time to make it the last mistake they make. Then again, sometimes a single second can make the difference between victory and defeat - so, yeah... the decision's up to you - no pressure, though...
There are different playable ships, which get unlocked as you progress through the game, some based on plot and others on performance. Likewise, there are upgrades that can improve your ship's abilities, but these are unlocked solely based on performance. If there's an upgrade that you didn't unlock, however, you can replay the mission that offers that upgrade until you do well enough to unlock it.
When you first start up the game, you will only have two missions available. Basically, the first mission of each of two campaigns: the original Campaign and a new Campaign for the Director's Cut, which allows you to relive some pivotal historical battles in a "simulation." As you complete levels, you unlock the next level in that Campaign. |
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Game Mechanics:
I played Strike Suit Zero on the PC, but found the controls frustratingly awkward. Strike Suit Zero felt like a game made for a console controller. Now, Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut brings the game to the PS4 and I have the opportunity to test out that theory. I think it is better on the PS4, personally, but the controls are ever-so-slightly awkward at this point. The only real complaint I have with the controls currently is the fact that up and down on either of the analog sticks is mapped to your ship's pitch. I would probably be happy with either one controlling pitch, but not both. As it is, I tend to be mindful of controlling the pitch and roll with my right thumb, and occasionally use my left stick to control yaw. However, since one axis of the Left Stick controls yaw and the other controls pitch, I will find my left thumb fighting my right thumb for control of the pitch. Quite often, I will be excitedly attempting to rotate to my left or right and end up pulling back on the Left Stick and the same time I'm trying to control the pitch by pushing up on the Right Stick. The result of this particular configuration is that the full downward throw of the Left Analog Stick counters the full upward throw of the Right Stick, cancelling each other out and keeping the pitch going dead set ahead. If I'm flustered enough for this to happen, it's because I really needed to change my pitch fairly urgently, so this is the opposite of what I need to happen at those times. If I could deactivate one of the two axes that are mapped to pitch, there would be no problem. The settings, however, don't allow you to make that adjustment. This is truly sad and unforgivable, when it should be such a small change to fix it.
The Director's Cut on the PS4 has addressed the biggest frustration I had with the PC version: being forced to replay large sections to get back to where I failed. The PS4 version has a more reasonable checkpoint system and even allows you to pick up at your last checkpoint if you leave the game and come back in (rather than within the same game session), but you better not hesitate; I once started to jump in at my last checkpoint then, one screen past that selection, hit (O) to go back to the Menu, then decided to go ahead and go back to the checkpoint, after all... and it was no longer an option.
If you can get used to the pitch being on both sticks - or if you can simply opt to use either yaw or roll and ignore one analog stick, altogether, then I highly recommend Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut - especially if you're the tenacious type. If you're looking for an easy-to-play arcade flight shoot-'em-up, then Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut may be a bit much to handle. |
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-Geck0, GameVortex Communications AKA Robert Perkins |
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