Released: 31 August 1997
Developer: Electronic Arts
Also Available For: PC and Nintendo 64

The Background:
After almost six months of conflict and thousands dead, the Gulf War had finally ended in March 1991 but the bloodshed proved as much of an influence on developer Mike Posehn as the air rescue mechanics of Choplifter (Dan Gorlin, 1982) in the creation of Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf (Electronic Arts, 1992). Opting to eschew typical videogame mechanics and focusing on nonlinear, mission-based gameplay, Desert Strike became one of the Mega Drive’s top titles; its 16-bit sequels introduced new vehicles and locations and were similarly praised, though reviews sound found the formula becoming stale. By 1996, the videogame industry moved on from traditional 2D graphics in favour of 3D polygons, and arena Sony’s PlayStation was purposely built for and which upended the battle for supremacy between SEGA and Nintendo. Following an aborted attempt to continue the series on the 3DO, Mike Posehn got the ball running on a far more lifelike and much praised fully-3D entry on the SEGA Saturn and PlayStation. Following the positive reception of Soviet Strike (Electronic Arts, 1996), the same development team (minus Posehn) got to work on the fifth (and, so far, final) entry; Nuclear Strike reportedly built upon its predecessor’s game engine, increasing the frame rate, lowering load times, including lasting environmental damage, and adding additional camera angles and an in-game radar. New vehicles and weapons were also added, as well as helpful clues to make the game more accessible and address the franchise’s notorious difficulty, though reviews found the story to be lacking. The graphics and destructible environments were widely praised, however, and it was largely seen as a fun, if repetitive and derivative, experience.

The Plot:
Former spy Colonel Beauford LeMonde has stolen a nuclear weapon and joined forced with Triad leader Napoleon Hwong to threaten the safety of the civilised world. The player character, who pilots a Super Apache helicopter as part of anti-terrorist strike force STRIKE, is ordered to pursue the warlord, who kidnaps the world leaders and prepares to unleash chaos upon the globe!

Gameplay:
In keeping with the new visual style introducing in Soviet Strike, Nuclear Strike ditches the illusion of 3D created by the isometric perspective of its predecessors and opts for a top-down perspective, with the camera sitting slightly above and behind the player’s vehicle. Like in the last game, you can change your viewpoint with the ‘Select’ button and this time I was actually able to notice the difference; one view kept the camera locked in place and the other saw it swing around with your movements, which I found quite disorientating. All of the movement and control options introduced in Soviet Strike make a welcome return here; there are five different controller layouts on offer, but I found the default button settings to be perfectly fine: X fires your rapid-fire chain gun, Square fires your Hydra Rockets, Circle the Hellfile Missiles, and Triangle will fire the super powerful sidewinders if they’re assigned to your wingtip. As before, you can “jink” (essentially a strafing option) with L1 and R1 to circle targets and avoid incoming fire more effectively, drop your cargo by pressing L2 and R2 together (though I only encountered one use for this, in the second campaign, where you can drop a powerful nitro-glycerine bomb to instantly destroy a fortified oil rig), remove the ammo, fuel, and armour and/or the compass from the heads-up display (HUD) with R2, and review the map and your mission status and objectives by pressing the Start button. A new feature added to Nuclear Strike is the ability to lock each weapon with L2; I thought this was some kind of targeting feature, or a way to restrict the use and wastage of your stronger weapons, but all it seemed to do was put a red border around the ammo box so I’m not entirely sure of the purpose of this function.

One way Nuclear Strike stands out not just from its predecessor but the last two games is the welcome return of additional vehicles; almost every campaign sees you commanding a different type of helicopter, and each one contains another craft you can switch to either by choice or at the behest of your mission objectives. You can hop back into a hovercraft, jump into a heavily-armoured harrier jet, and even roll around in a super tough tank or missile launcher, with the majority of your weapons still at your disposal (though the tank only has its main gun). When in one of these additional vehicles, you can hold L2 and R2 to initiate a self-destruct mode that will see it explode and your main chopper fly in to pick you up, which is handy when you’re stuck halfway across the map in the tank or hovercraft. All-in-all the game boasts it contains several playable vehicles, though as most are variations on the chopper this is a bit misleading but there are some key differences; your default chopper can only carry six passengers, for example, whereas the Huey (which also sports twin guns) can carry twelve. In campaign three, you’re placed at the controls of a smaller, feebler chopper than can only fire weak bullets and non-lethal rounds like smoke and tear gas and can only carry four passengers; you must use these limited options to flush out delegates and get them to safety and then blast parts of the environment (radio towers, petrol stations, and train barriers) to crush or destroy incoming enemy vehicles before switching to a more capable aircraft, which can be tricky as your little chopper is pretty pathetic. Two campaigns also introduce a degree of real-time strategy gameplay to the series; in one campaign, waves of enemies will come rolling across the map and you must fly to different bases to command ground forces to intercept them and form roadblocks. You can fly around trying to take them out yourself, but the sheer number makes this all-but impossible, though I found it equally difficult to find the bases and command my allies as you can’t do it remotely. This function pops up again in the final campaign, where you can direct some commandos to help you take out six radar towers, and your co-pilot will also help you to destroy a proto-nuclear missile and its launcher rig by jumping into her own chopper.

The game’s map system is exactly the same as the one seen in Soviet Strike but with some tweaks to the presentation; dialogue and onscreen notifications give information about your mission objectives, which you can read up on and cycle through from the map screen. I found that I was only able to tackle one mission at a time rather than reading ahead on a few of them as in previous games, though this might be because I played the game on the “Normal” difficult instead of the “Easy” setting. Either way, you can through your mission objectives, enemies, and notable resources and have each of these highlighted on the map to make it easier to plot an optimal route. Nuclear Strike also adds a helpful mini radar to the HUD and a green arrow to the compass that points you in the direction of whatever target you’ve selected on the map; the only thing to remember about the HUD is that enemy forces are highlighted in red and blue as blue indicates mission objectives so you might need to fire upon both. Even better is the fact that there’s finally a way to quick-exit a campaign if you fail or are in danger of failing; simply press Start and Select simultaneously and you’ll be returned to the main menu rather than having to slog all the way back to home base, though there’s still no option for analogue support. You are once again given a choice of a few loadouts for your chopper, though: you can balance out your ammo, focus on your missiles, or even fly into battle with just your chain gun; you can also customise the wingtip loadout to carry sidewinder missiles, additional fuel, or disrupt the enemy’s radar. As always, you get three lives (known as “attempts”) per campaign and will automatically winch up resources (fuel, ammo, and armour), targets (friendlies (your co-pilot and other agents), enemy commanders, dignitaries, and so forth), and cargo (nitro, cages) simply by flying over them and the new maps make it a little easier to accomplish this compared to the last game. Like Soviet Strike, you can no longer bash into buildings or mountains or parts of the environment, which is useful for reducing the damage you take, and you’re still awarded passwords after completing each campaign (though you must manually save your progress from the main menu) and at least one campaign even has a checkpoint, of sorts, that allows you to skip to a later point in the narrative after a nuclear device has exploded.

While many of Nuclear Strike’s mission objectives are very similar to those of the previous games, it definitely felt like things were a lot more varied and far less tedious this time around. At first, your doing familiar actions like firing upon burning smoke pits, destroy enemy forces to recruit and rescue targets, and taking out radar sites but there’s often a twist: when you rescue one target, you’re surprised by an ambush; other friendlies you rescue will fly into battle with you in choppers to help root out three enemy generals, for example. There are far more escort missions this time around; your ally and co-pilot, Naja Han, will lead you to target sites by driving erratically across the map on a motorcycle and will also need covering as she rescues diplomats from buildings. This results in two of the tougher missions, one where she’s driving a busload of work leaders through heavily-defended streets while you just have your piddling little chopper and another where you need to protect her as she drives a train to safety. The former can be quite fun as you blast barriers to move her down safer routes, watch her jump a gap in the bus, and listen to her passenger’s bicker and ask for ice cream; the latter is a little more stressful as you must quickly destroy or redirect suicidal trains and take out the heavy ordinance that can quickly make mincemeat of the train. While the second campaign is primarily about large-scale destruction of the enemy’s sea forces, you’ll also need to bribe a local mercenary by dropping off a crate load of treasure, drop him off to uncover missile sites that need destroying, and take out a fleet of Chinese ships before they escape. The final mission includes a huge electromagnetic pulse (EMP)  in the middle of the map that disables all of your weapons except the chain gun and is heavily defended by cannons and massive tank-like Guardian Guns that can only be destroyed by having your co-pilot disable them first. You’ll need to take out the EMP by slipping inside and destroying the camouflaged trucks your co-pilot highlights and also investigate six Mongol-like structures trying to find and destroy three nuclear missiles. Overall, while the missions are very similar to its predecessors, there’s a lot less ferrying of passengers or repetitive tasks; the ability to command ground forces helps to mitigate a lot of the frantic flying about and there are lots of combat options available thanks to you and your co-pilot being able to command other vehicles.

Graphics and Sound:  
Nuclear Strike offers much of the same as its predecessor in terms of its presentation, bringing its varied and ambitiously detailed environments to life using only the finest polygonal graphics of the era, but goes a step further in a lot of little ways. While you mainly pilot variations of an attack chopper, just the fact that there are several vehicles to use is a step up from the last game; each is a fully functioning 3D model with differing speeds and handling, which starts to smoke when they take enough damage and explode in flames when shot down. Thanks to the game not being restricted to the Soviet Union and instead taking place around China and Korea and other such locations, the game maps are far more varied this time around; there’s a decent smattering of water to show off the new splash effects from weapons and explosions, fields and villages, and fully 3D models of buildings to recreate cities and Mongol temples in later campaigns. Probably the most diverse location in the game is Pyongyang, which starts out as a bustling city with functioning train tracks and ornate buildings to liberate dignitaries from and ends up a nuclear wasteland following an explosion; radioactive pits, wrecked buildings, and smouldering ruins scatter the landscape and really help to sell the gravity of the situation. Not only did I not notice any of the PlayStation’s trademark texture warping and screen tearing this time around, but any damage you cause to the environment was permanent this time around, meaning you’ll always see evidence of your firefights and the destruction caused from your conflicts.

While the game is still limited to five campaigns, your missions are as varied as the environments this time around; the second and final campaigns probably offer the most visual and gameplay variety, with you flying across the map taking out missiles and fortified oil rigs in the former and both avoiding heavy artillery and trying to knock out the EMP in the latter. Campaign four is especially notable for showcasing just how powerful the PlayStation is compared to its 16-bit predecessors as the sheer number of enemy forces can be overwhelming at times; they’ll trickle down through narrow passes, burst out from holes, and come crashing into your bases disguised as supply drops and they all need fending off and obstructing with your ground forces. There’s even a bit of day and night action here as the mission progresses and it can get extremely chaotic if you don’t properly marshal your reinforcements. Like its predecessor, Nuclear Strike also includes some in-game music to keep the adrenaline pumping throughout your high-stakes missions; while it dips in and out more often that in the last game, you’ll get a bit more variety other than some thumping tracks with victory jingles and even “Ride of the Valkyries” playing at one point, which did make me chuckle. As before, there’s a lot of voice work on offer here, too; everyone from your commanding officer, your co-pilot, and those you’ve rescued will offer encouragement, reprimands, and reminders as you blast your way through enemy targets and the game’s story is once again told entirely through some of the cheesiest and overly-edited FMV sequences from this era of gaming.

Enemies and Bosses:
If you’ve played any of the Strike games before, particularly the previous game, then you know exactly what to expect in terms of enemies. Interestingly, I noticed that there seemed to be far less soldiers this time around; they’re still there, now sporting conical headwear and still shooting rifles and rockets from the ground and from trees, but they seemed less frequent than before. There are some variants here, too; after Pyongyang is devastated by a nuclear explosion, enemy soldiers wear haz-mat suits, and you’ll find a lot more armoured personnel carriers this time around. As is expect, tanks, jeeps, and anti-aircraft cannons are commonplace throughout Nuclear Strike; there seems to be a lot more missile launchers this time around as the stakes are much higher and enemies also barrel across the landscape of motorcycles to make for difficult targets. Occasionally, enemy helicopters will enter the fight and can also prove to be difficult to target; it’s therefore heavily advised that you destroy them while they’re grounded or make use of the “jink” feature toe strafe around them when they come flying in at high speeds. You’ll still need to check your fire as well; it’s all very well and good blasting away at enemy strongholds to free prisoners and such but you’ll screw up the mission if you kill or destroy the wrong targets and cost yourself some valuable resources if you’re too trigger happy, to say nothing of the greater number of enemy forces this time around.

For all the improvements and new features included in Nuclear Strike, you still won’t encounter any traditional boss battles. For the most part, the closest you’ll get to this is being tasked with destroying fleets and waves of enemies; the second campaign sees you defending a satellite from a missile attack, taking out an airfield and nine Hell Ranger choppers, destroying a fleet of chips, tracking down and sinking missile boats before they can launch, and raiding an enemy base. There’s also a heavily-defended oil rig here which pops up again in the game’s hidden campaign; if you don’t drop the nitro onto it, this can be quite difficult to destroy as it takes quite a beating and the target you’re there to retrieve even makes a getaway in a boat afterwards! After Pyongyang’s left a radioactive hellscape from a nuclear explosion, you need to safeguard an armoured train; enemy trains will come up from behind and ahead to try and ram and destroy yours so you need to take them out quickly, but the enemy tanks and missile launchers can’t be ignored either. The sheer number of enemy forces in the fourth campaign cannot be tackled alone; you need to give orders to your various ground troops to help you out as tanks, missile launchers, and armoured carriers can easily swarm all over the map and spell disaster for you. In the final mission, you won’t be able to put a dent in those Guardian Guns without your co-pilot disabling them first, but you also need to distract them so they don’t shoot or run her over, which can be a death sentence in itself. Finally, when the proto-nuclear missile is prepped for launch, you and your co-pilot need to blast it to smithereens to safeguard the civilised world, but you’ll also need to destroy the super-tough carrier it’s on and keep an eye out for any cannons, choppers, and tanks still roaming around the base.

Power-Ups and Bonuses:
All the usual resources you’d expect from a Strike game are on offer here: you’ll find caches and crates of fuel, armour, and ammo scattered around the map, hidden inside buildings, and waiting at landing zones. Very rarely, you’ll also find an extra life that you can winch up and there are even some secret pick-ups to be found in certain campaigns, such as the aforementioned nitro, sea mines, night vision goggles, a faster winch, and a super cannon. Every campaign also has at least one vehicle you can switch to or drop your co-pilot off to use; there are often benefits to switching to a tank, such as being able to crash through buildings and obstacles, to say nothing of the additional and much appreciated power of the Harrier jet, though some, like the hovercraft, can be a little unwieldy to control.

Additional Features:
As it still lacks any unlockables or even a scoring system, the main reason to revisit Nuclear Strike is to test out different loadouts, maybe try the “Normal” difficulty if you beat the game on “Easy”, seek out the hidden vehicles and optional objectives in each campaign, and try to complete your missions in faster and more efficient ways. The only thing you gain upon completion is a teaser for the next game in the series, apparently titled Future Strike, which obviously we never got, though STRIKE files are once again available on the main menu to add some extra context to the story. You can also still use passwords to skip to later campaigns or make your playthrough far easier and more enjoyable with some useful cheats; you can gift yourself stronger weapons, speed yourself up, disable enemy fire, or reap the benefits of unlimited fuel, invincibility, infinite ammo, and armour to make even the toughest campaigns a little easier. These can be entered in conjunction with level passwords, which is even better, and there’s even a password to access a secret campaign that appears to be some kind of test or training mission; here, you’re given three objectives (destroy hostiles to liberate allies, commandeer a tank or Harrier, and destroy a fortified oil rig) and basically given a little sandbox to mess around in.

The Summary:
Without a doubt, Nuclear Strike is leaps and bounds the best in the series since the second game; where Soviet Strike was quite a stripped back experience that didn’t take advantage of the PlayStation’s greater power beyond the 3D paintjob and other aesthetic features, Nuclear Strike adds a whole bunch of variety to the presentation that makes it a truly worthwhile entry in the series. Everything that worked from the last game returns as reliable as ever but has been improved upon; the additional vehicles that reskins of choppers are great fun to use and actually give an incentive for exploration and I enjoyed how varied the campaigns were to create a nice balance between frantic combat, rescue, and escort missions. Unfortunately, the real-time strategy mechanics were more miss than hit with me; not being able to figure out how to highlight the bases or command the troops remotely made it more of a chore than it needed to be, but these mechanics were still better implemented than the awful on-foot sections from the third game. The twist of lumbering you with a non-lethal and ineffectual craft added an extra level of strategy to one campaign, though defending that train proved quite tricky thanks to how fragile the carriages are. The music wasn’t much to shout about but I enjoyed the visual variety on offer, the increased stakes, ad the new graphical features such as lasting damage and improved polygons and explosions. Although Nuclear Strike is a vast improvement over Soviet Strike in every way, though, there’s still a distinct lack of replayability to the title that keeps it for being a five-star experience; I’d definitely recommend this one of the two and it’s a game I can see myself revisiting, but the difficulty curve can still be a brick wall at times and it’s not always massively clear what you need to do to progress even with the improvements to the map system. Overall, Nuclear Strike is well worth a playthrough, and you can easily just skip to this one form the second game, but don’t be ashamed to take advantage of the cheat codes if you’re struggling.

My Rating:

Great Stuff

Did you ever own Nuclear Strike back in the day? How do you think it compares to the previous game and the other games in the series? What did you think to the vehicles on offer, and which was your favourite? Were you a fan of the new environments and the altered mission objectives? How did you find the real-time strategy mechanics and which of the campaigns was the hardest for you to complete? Whatever your thoughts on Nuclear Strike, go ahead and share them below or comment on my social media and maybe check out my other Strike reviews.

Released: 31 October 1996
Developer: Electronic Arts
Also Available For: PlayStation Network and SEGA Saturn

The Background:
The Gulf War had finally ended by March 1991 after nearly six months of bloodshed that left thousands dead, though the conflict was clearly an influence on developer Mike Posehn when he built upon the air rescue mechanics of Choplifter (Dan Gorlin, 1982) to create Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf (Electronic Arts, 1992). Focusing on nonlinear, mission-based gameplay and eschewing typical videogame mechanics, Desert Strike became one of the Mega Drive’s top titles; its two sequels introduced new vehicles and environments while retaining the core gameplay mechanics but were similarly praised despite criticisms about the formula becoming stale. By 1996, the videogame industry was moving away from traditional 2D graphics and into the third dimension; the battle for supremacy between SEGA and Nintendo was upended by a new contender, Sony’s PlayStation, and the Strike series found a new home there after development of a 3DO continuation stalled. Reportedly, Mike Posehn assisted in the game’s early development before a larger team took over, redesigning the 16-bit graphics and environments into something altogether more lifelike by superimposing real-world topography onto polygonal maps. To better map out the game’s new perspective and approach, the team built replicas of their maps out of plywood and was the first game in the series to feature full motion video (FMV). Soviet Strike has been received rather fairly; reviews praise the graphical leap forward, the FMV sequences, and the gameplay and mechanics. While the difficulty, perspective, and some aspects of the presentation were also criticised, Soviet Strike was followed by a fifth and final entry the following year and even made it onto the PlayStation Store in 2009.

The Plot:
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, former KGB Chairman Uri Vatsiznov (a.k.a. the Shadowman) seeks to fill the power vacuum and spark an international war. Only STRIKE, a special covert operations unit, has the weaponry and capability of opposing Shadowman, and the player must once again pilot an Apache helicopter to fight back against Shadowman and his nefarious comrades.

Gameplay:
Unlike its predecessors, which opted for an isometric perspective to create the illusion of being 3D in a largely 2D era of gaming, Soviet Strike switches to a top-down perspective, with the camera placed above and slightly behind the player’s fully armed chopper. The game does offer the option to switch your viewpoint using the ‘Select’ button, but all this seemed to do was swing the camera back around to its default position in the rare instances where it gets twisted around by the in-game action. Thanks to the additional buttons and movement options offered by the PlayStation’s graphical superiority, Soviet Strike both plays very similar to its predecessors but also expands the controls somewhat: the game offers four different button layouts, but the default is more than adequate, allowing you to fire your Hellfires with Circle, chaingun with X, and your Hydra Rockets with Square and adding a fourth, more powerful missile – one assigned to your wingtip – with Triangle. The previous games allowed you to “jink” but I found little use for this ability; here, it’s mapped to L1 and R1 and is very useful for “sidestepping” out of the way of incoming fire. L2 allows you to drop whatever cargo you’re carrying (though this was only necessary in one mission so could’ve just been an automatic function to discourage you from accidentally destroying vital cargo), R2 changes the heads-up display to remove the ammo, fuel, and armour so you just have the compass or remove everything entirely to more closely resemble the 16-bit games, and you can pause the game and review the map and current objectives with the Start button.

The map is now far more realistic than in the previous games and took me a little while to adjust to but is actually more useful than ever; at times, you’ll get onscreen notifications about mission objectives and can view these by pressing start, but you can also cycle through your mission objectives, enemies, and notable resources and have each highlighted on the map to make plotting an optimal route even easier. You can read up on each mission, enemy, and resource, review the status of your current objectives, and get a better sense of the story from this screen as well, though there’s still no way to manually quit the game without failing the mission and being forced back to home base. Although Soviet Strike doesn’t offer analogue support and you can’t select a co-pilot this time around, you can customise your chopper with a number of loadouts: you can balance your ammo across all weapons, focus on your missiles, or even head into battle with just your chaingun; you can also customise your wingtip loadout to give you the powerful sidewinder missiles, additional fuel, or disrupt the enemy’s radar. As ever, you’ll automatically winch up resources (fuel, ammo, and armour), targets (prisoners of war (POWs), enemy commanders, scientists, and the like), and cargo (nuclear cores and missiles) just by flying over them, though I found the new perspective made it a little tricky to properly target these, and the game completely goes away with the building collision seen in its predecessors; now, you’ll automatically fly over any structures in your way, which is helpful for maintaining your armour though at the cost of a level of realism. As ever, you’re given three lives (known as “attempts”) to complete each of the five campaigns and must complete a variety of missions within each campaign; the scoring system has been done away with, however, but, while the password system returns, you can manually save after completing each campaign.

Strangely, considering the additional power of the PlayStation compared to 16-bit consoles, Soviet Strike doesn’t include any other vehicles or gameplay modes other than the main chopper, meaning that the variety on offer is more akin to Desert Strike than its sequels. Additionally, the missions you’re tasked with completing are extremely familiar to those from previous games and range from destroying radar sites to reduce the number of onscreen enemies, rescuing POWs and other targets and dropping them off at one of five different landing zones (necessitating a bit of back-and-forth traversal as you can only carry six passengers at a time), destroying enemy buildings and airfields, and disabling enemy ships. If you fail any one of these missions, either by being too trigger happy or not being fast enough to destroy or rescue certain targets, the entire campaign is scrubbed and you must return to base to try all over again from the beginning, though you’re often asked “only” to rescue a certain number of targets rather than all of them. As you progress through the game, some objectives will be hidden from you or unavailable until you complete others or pick up key intel, and the game maps are generally arranged in such a way to promote successive progression from one objective to the next. Things soon get quite nuanced as you must rescue an agent before he’s gunned down by a firing squad, drop him off and defend his position as he sets charges, enters a nuclear plant, or calls in an airstrike, dispose of nuclear missiles by dropping them into the sea, fend off a landing assault and, in the third campaign, destroy waves of different enemy tanks and vehicles as they move to converge on a number of different target sites. Enemies will now target friendlies this time around, destroying your resources and attacking villages and such, and you’ll sometimes be notified of additional side missions as you go, though you can ignore all of these without punishment if you wish. By the time you reach the fifth and final mission, things become extremely delicate; you must defend key targets from enemy attacks, rescue government officials before they’re killed, hunt down and destroy a number of bomb trucks before they destroy the city bridges, and defend your co-pilot as she races around the city to get a dignitary to an airport, all of which can get quite stressful as you have to redo the entire campaign from the start if you fail at any point.

Graphics and Sound:  
Naturally, Soviet Strike is a step up from its predecessors; almost everything is rendered in the finest polygonal graphics the PlayStation has to offer and given a gloss of realism that was ambitiously attempted in the 16-bit titles but not fully realised until the jump to 32-bits. Your helicopter is a fully functioning 3D model, one that easily and smoothly cuts through the air and can “jink” aside from incoming fire; it even starts to smoke when you take enough damage and will burst apart in a ball of fire when being shot down. Enemy vehicles are similarly rendered, appearing to be faster and more versatile as a result, and you’ll encounter the same level of fun detail applied to the various structure sin each environment; drilling rigs, chemical plants, power stations, and the glory of the Kremlin are all brought to life as well defined 3D models, most of which can be destroyed either as part of your mission, to uncover resources and targets, or to cost you your chance at completing the campaign. Although everything has been given a bit more substance and appeal through the shift to a fully 3D perspective, the overall presentation remains very similar to its predecessors, and you won’t really find anything new on offer here in terms of visual variety. Generally, though, everything runs very smoothly; the load times are pretty fast and I noticed very little slowdown during my playthrough, though there were instances of texture warping and screen tearing at times as was common in many PlayStation titles.

Despite the power of the PlayStation, however, the game is still limited to five campaigns and five locations, without any additional gameplay mechanics or options afforded to the player. Similar to how the first game was restricted to the desert, Soviet Strike sets all of its action in various locations in Soviet Russia, though there is some visual variety on offer; you start off in a rural area surrounded by snowy mountains, venture to a heavily fortified dock and sea, attack airfields in a frozen wasteland, and even venture into the desert once more, now far more interesting to look at thanks to the rocky terrain. You’ll also visit Transylvania, complete with wolf howls, radioactive dumping grounds, and suitably gothic aesthetics, and the bustling cityscape of the Kremlin for the final mission. There are a few fun things to spot here and there, from moose to people sunbathing on the beach and friendly villages, all of which can be destroyed. The game also includes in-game music for the first time; it’s nothing spectacular and simply comprised of thumping beats, but its greatly appreciated. There’s also a fair amount of voice work on offer as your co-pilot and passengers offer advice, praise, and reprimands, and the game’s story is entirely related through choppy, frantic FMV sequences that are full of the cheese and over-the-top acting you’d expect from this era of gaming.

Enemies and Bosses:
Although coated with a fancy new 3D coat of paint, most of the enemies you’ll encounter throughout Soviet Strike are largely and functionally the same as those from previous games. The game offers gun-toting soldiers and their rocket launcher variants, who can hide in towers, bunkers, and stream from armoured vehicles to attack the targets you’re trying to rescue, as well as various jeeps and tanks that roll around the map. Anti-aircraft turrets and cannons are also commonplace and should be targeted as soon as possible, though you’ll obviously want to avoid or take out the enemy’s larger missile-firing ordinance as soon as you can. Some campaigns see snowmobiles, jet skis, and Hind helicopters join the fray, as well as amphibious tanks and some enemy placements being hidden in buildings. It’s important not to fire away willy-nilly; not only to do risk expending your limited ammunition but you could also hit a vital target and cost yourself the mission if you’re not too careful, and the game’s new perspective can make hitting enemies a little tougher this time around so it’s always a good idea to make use of the “jink” function and to take cover behind buildings wherever possible.

As before, Soviet Strike doesn’t feature any traditional boss battles; instead, you’ll need to do your fare share of retrieving, defending, and destroying targets. At first, this isn’t too much of a stretch as long as you don’t accidentally destroy the villa you need to be infiltrating in the first campaign but every time you need to defend a target you’ll be faced with waves of tanks. Enemies even spawn in to attack the scientists who are key to preparing a salt mine and deactivating a nuclear core in the Transylvania campaign, but the biggest test here is airlifting eleven of them out of an incoming blast zone with no onscreen time and the landing zone being a fair distance away, meaning it can be pretty hairy making the round trip to get everyone to safety. The second campaign sees you sinking enemy submarines, cargo ships, and a large, heavily defended carrier, some of which must be destroyed before they can escape which can be easier said than done if you’re running low on resources. Similarly, the third campaign can be quite the endurance as you must destroy waves of incoming enemy vehicles before they can destroy friendly settlements; ammo and other resources are scattered about but these are some of the game’s deadliest enemy vehicles and they advance in large groups, meaning it’s easy to cut get down by the crossfire. While flying about the Kremlin, you’ll need to be quick on the controls to keep the government officials from being killed and stop the bomber trucks from destroying the city bridges, but it’s the escort mission that can prove the most trying. Luckily, there’s a backup vehicle on hand if the enemy (or you, accidentally) destroys the limo, but the vehicle’s driving is so erratic, and the number of tanks and enemy vehicles so numerous, that it can be easy to lose track of your target and fail to protect it. Finally, you’ll need to be both aggressive and mindful when luring out and capturing the elusive Shadowman; you need to take him alive so you have to sink his escape boat and hold fire long enough to retrieve him, which can be difficult given how many hits some of these more heavily-armoured enemy vehicles can take.

Power-Ups and Bonuses:
Sadly, there really isn’t anything new on offer here that hasn’t been seen in previous Strike videogames. You start off with a set amount of ammo, fuel, and armour and these can all be replenished by finding various crates and resources across the game’s environments, all helpfully indicated on your map. You’ll very rarely find an extra life and maybe a brief upgrade to some of your arsenal, but what you see is basically what you get; beyond the different loadouts on offer, which basically amount to different difficulty settings for the game, there’s nothing different here at all and actually less than was seen in the last two games as you can’t switch to other vehicles this time around.

Additional Features:
Without a high score table, the only real reasons to play through Soviet Strike again would be to test out different loadouts, find faster and more efficient ways to complete each campaign, and maybe seek out some of the optional side missions to see how (or even if) they impact the story. There isn’t anything to unlock after finishing the game, though you can read STRIKE files on the main menu for some added context and make use to the passwords to jump ahead to later campaigns if you like. There are also, thankfully, some useful passwords on offer here; you can grant yourself stronger weapons, unlimited fuel, invincibility, extra lives, or even infinite ammo, fuel, and lives to make even the toughest campaigns a little easier. You can input these cheats in conjunction with level passwords as well, which is even more helpful, though none of these will help you if you kill or destroy the wrong target. Apparently, the SEGA Saturn version is actually superior in a number of ways and offers a few extra features so it might be worth checking that version of the game for a comparison.

The Summary:
If there’s one thing holding Soviet Strike back, it’s the sharp difficulty curve; for me, all of the Strike games have been pretty difficult and demand a lot from the player, giving such a small window for error and forcing you to return to base if you fail even one of your objectives. Thus, you’re forced to play perfectly right away, each and every time, and the game encourages trial and error and replaying each campaign until you find an optimal solution that allows you to make the best use of your resources to take out targets and rescue others without losing your pitiful number of lives. This is true of the Strike games I’ve played before but is somehow more palpable here, with the game throwing a whole mess of targets at you in the second campaign that will test the limits of your ammo conservation and patience in navigating the many onscreen hazards. Thankfully, the game’s passwords mean you can tip the odds in your favour, but even infinite fuel, ammo, and lives don’t amount to much if your allies are killed by enemy fire or your won trigger finger. Soviet Strike seems to veer more towards action than its predecessors; there’s far more resources available to you one each map and firefights and explosions are so much more action-packed and pronounced thanks to the 3D graphics, which makes the game very enjoyable, but it’s frustrating when you painstakingly airlift scientists to safety only to have them wiped out because you were busy with another objective and didn’t realise they were being picked off. The lack of additional vehicles and restricting the action to Russia, however varied the game’s maps may be, is also a shame but my overall experience with Soviet Strike was largely positive and I could see myself revisiting it for more polygonal action in the future.

My Rating:

Great Stuff

Was Soviet Strike included in your PlayStation library back in the day? How do you think it compares to the previous games in the series? What did you think to the new perspective and 3D models? Were you disappointed by the lack of extra vehicles and being stuck in Russia or did you enjoy the new loadouts and combat options? Which of the campaigns and missions was the hardest for you to complete? Whatever you think about Soviet Strike, feel free share them below or comment on my social media and check in next Saturday for my review of the final entry in the series.