Space, the final frontier, these are the voyagers…
I’m just kidding, that tag line has been rattling around in my head for days. Every time I embark on brave new mission in a space game, to boldly go (see I can’t stop now) where no incredibly clichéd character has been shoddily voiced to go, I start to hum the theme tune and make puerile sound effects as I swerve around in my chair, whilst flapping my control pad around in my hands like an overly stimulated 7 year old with a new X-Wing model. Which I still maintain, does help to make you turn quicker in games.
Born Ready Games have been nice enough to give us a new reason to regress to a happier time, in the form of Strike Suit Zero. Said game was developed through a Kickstarter fund that reached way past its $100K goal in November of last year.
The soundtrack was developed by Paul Ruskay, who as some may know, is the composer of the original Homeworld soundtrack. It has a lovely anime quality about it, as does the overall gameplay.
I think you can agree from that trailer it looks and sounds superb, and I won’t make any claim to the contrary on that. The transforming space tuxedo handles beautifully, if you happened to play either of High Moon Studios homage to the awesomeness that is Transformers, you will already have a feel for how the craft controls. Simply play any of the levels involving the flying bots, that’s what this instantly reminded me of, and this is no bad thing, no bad thing at all.
The first couple of missions hold your hand more than, the now famous, overly attached girlfriend, but as soon as you get hold of the Strike Suit, it’s like having all your mech game prayers answered all at once. Getting the hang of switching between ship and suit mode takes a little learning, although when you have it down, you can stream in to the middle of countless small fighters, reveal your inner Starscream and lay waste to those miserable Autobots, I mean space colony fighters.
The bigger of the battles in the game can be genuinely breathtaking, breakneck speed affairs, taking on the capitol ships with fifty smaller fighters buzzing around you can be impressive to say the least. However this is also where part of the problem comes in.
Shifting in to suit mode, for some reason that I really cannot fathom, seems to paint a massive bullseye on your metal heiny. Honestly, it’s like farting in an elevator, except everyone knows it’s you. Your shields disappear in an instant with no other option but to switch back to fighter mode and boost out of there. I thought at first it was a L2P issue, you can try dodging constantly but it burns your thrusters out. I know it sounds odd and it is, what should make you feel powerful, in fact makes you feel like a paper aeroplane.
I can’t be sure if this is intentional, or a design fault, either way it was frown inducing. Unfortunately this isn’t where the problems end.
If there is one thing in Strike Suit Zero that makes me want to kick puppies, it’s the mission structure. There are always certain levels in games that you groan at as you approach the cusp, knowing that you have to slow walk an annoying NPC somewhere, protecting possibly the most dim witted moron in gaming history, wondering why anyone could want to hurt someone so stupid, that it doesn’t cause them to alter their pace whilst being assaulted by thirty highly trained ninja robot dogs. You know the ones I mean, we’ve all been there, but you struggle through knowing that the next part of the game is made of awesome. The only thing is, every mission is like that in Strike Suit Zero.
It’s not always escort missions, but pretty much any other annoying type of mission you can think of is here. it usually consists of “Go here and kill X amount of these” affairs. You could be forgiven for feeling like you were playing a particular Blizzard title. Regrettably, this is the games downfall, if it was one or two missions, then I could look past it, but this is not a forgivable sin, the moments of grin inspiring dogfighting disappear in the barrage of poor mission design.
The game’s narrative is something of a mixed bag. It starts off with a nicely laid out plot, an almost Firefly like divide with Earth and outer colony planets. A few minutes more though, and the game devolves in to the most painful cliché.
The main protagonist, named Adams, is a disgraced pilot (groan) and is on maneuvers when they get called in to battle. When they happen upon the Strike Suit, it is decided Adams should pilot it (obviously). It goes on from there, in the exact direction you would expect. The short version is that the story is poor at best. I haven’t rolled my eyes so much since the last time I watched reality TV.
The voice acting isn’t great either, but with such a small budget to work with, they couldn’t be expected to find much in the way of quality. So I don’t want to jump on them too much for that.
Strike Suit Zero does some things exceedingly well. Sound effects, ambient soundtrack, visuals and wonderfully intuitive controls make for some great moments in mid battle, only to be torn down by appalling mission structure and bad narrative. It feels like the former should outweigh the latter, but in my humble opinion, without exciting objectives and a reason to care about your characters, it becomes very hard to want to keep playing. A game shouldn’t feel so painful to play as this did the vast majority of the time.
What it does show, is how close an indie developer can come to making a truly great old school experience, with such a tiny budget. With a bit more thought to certain areas and a bit more money to throw at the developer, I think we could have had something great on our hands. As it stands, you may be able to look past the grievances I have with it, there are some good moments to be had here, and space combat junkies should definitely suit up. This game is somewhat damaged, but it’s not broken.
I’m hoping to see good things from Born Ready Games in the future, something a bit more polished, a bit more refined, something that will again raise the bar in indie development.