Review - Strike Suit Zero

Game Name:    Strike Suit Zero

Developer:    Born Ready Games

Platform:     Windows (Steam)

Genre: Space Combat Sim

Engine: Xed

Release Date: January 23, 2013

The first thing I should probably mention before I go too deep into my opinion of this game, is my background and history with space fighter simulation games. This is a genre I’m hugely fond of, not because I played FreeSpace 2 or X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, I hear these are excellent games that helped shape the genre, but I never played these. I played Freelancer, and I played it A LOT. Since Freelancer, it has been incredibly difficult to find good space sims. I think the only other space sim I’ve played since Freelancer was a Xbox 360 exclusive called DarkStar One: Broken Alliance,  a port of an older PC space sim, DarkStar One, and it was painfully mediocre. So of course, with the long drought of these types of games, and the announcement of Star Citizen bringing that itch back in a huge way, I was feverishly excited for Strike Suit Zero (SSZ).

The game consists of 13 missions which the player fights through as a UNE (United Nations of Earth) fighter pilot to unravel a narrative of war between Earth and the culmination of forces from distant colonized planets. I’ll just say it, Strike Suit Zero is not a next-gen Freelancer (I’ll have to wait for Star Citizen, I guess). The game focuses on one particular facet of games like Freelancer, and that’s the space combat. Everything else, and I mean everything (exploration, ship customization, ship diversity, player choices, breadth of content) is all tossed to the wayside. That being said, if the space combat itself if your favorite part of space sims, you will likely enjoy this game a lot.

Each mission has a special objective that you can complete to unlock a new upgrade in the wholly unexplained and ambiguous tech trees that each of the ships possess. While the tech trees are an awesome idea, one that I would normally love, there’s virtually no information given about them. Before you start the mission, where the special objective is given, there’s a tiny, vague description of what completing the objective will give you (“unlock Energy upgrade for your ship”), but when you actually get to ship selection where the tech tree is shown, there’s just a picture of what you’ve unlocked, and no explanation whatsoever. Considering how absurdly difficult some of these extra objectives are (there were a couple missions I retried probably 20 times to unlock them), it comes across as feeling pointless and not very satisfying to get these unlocks as you really have no idea what the hell they even do.
As you complete missions you’ll also unlock new weapons that you can equip in your ship’s weapon slots. This is literally the only thing you can customize in the game, and it’s not exciting. Throughout the entire game, I think there is one new primary weapon unlock,  and only a handful of missile weapon unlocks, which are generally just more advanced versions your starting missiles.

The rigidness of ship customization and unlocks wouldn’t be so horrible if we had some options within the missions to play around a bit, but alas, you don’t. The missions are typically split up between 2 or 3 checkpoints. There’s a pretty clear way to get from checkpoint to checkpoint, you won’t be blazing your own trail by any means. The fact that your mission usually takes place within a much larger AI battle means there are chances for odd things to happen (almost never in your favor). This mixes things up between retries a minimal amount, but overall the mission design is painfully straightforward. Combine this with the lack of customizations and upgrades, and SSZ makes for a very linear game experience.

Okay, I’m going to give you a fair warning, you’re going to die in this game... a lot. There’s been a lot of buzz, and a lot of negative feedback regarding this game, based on its difficulty curve. The gist of it is that the checkpoint placements blow. Many of the missions are fine, the checkpoints are well spaced out, and you can get through them without too much issue. But there are a few missions that make some mighty big expectations as to what you can accomplish without a checkpoint. This results in replaying the same grueling 10 or 15 minutes of combat, in which any number of things can go wrong, to try to beat that last part before the next checkpoint. This is sort of typical for space sim games, I remember going through similar stints in Freelancer, but holy shit; the rage induced by the poor checkpoint placement in these missions is only comparable to the nearly untouchable League of Legends rage that one inevitably endures if they play that game.

You'll be seeing this screen a lot.

As I said, not all the missions are so bad. Unfortunately, it only takes a couple of instances to get you fired up to the point of not wanting to play the game anymore. In order to finish the game, I ended up having to limit myself to one hour sessions, most of which ended in fury. If I had not planned to review the game, there’s a good chance I would have quit.

So I’ve given this game a pretty hard time so far, let me explain what the game does well, because it’s not all bad. Throughout your journey, you are treated to the sounds of Paul Ruskay who supplies a strange electronic, ambient, sci-fi sound to the game. I’m not sure if this is for everybody, but I enjoyed it; at the very least, it made for a unique sound. The combat sound is also well done. Things can get pretty intense at times, and the sound adds to that feeling in a big way.

I think I’ve made it clear that the game primarily focuses on the space combat, as opposed to an open-ended, interactive, space sim experience. You can tell the emphasis was put on combat, because it’s actually really good! Most missions consist of fulfilling some number of objectives throughout a large scale battle between Earth and Colonial forces, though there are several missions in which you do the stereotypical escort or small squad sneak attack.

The big difference between this game and other space combat sims out there is the presence of a special ship you eventually get your hands on called the (you guessed it!) Strike Suit. This ship has two forms, one normal space fighter ship form, and a less-mobile, but far more powerful and stationary, mecha form. Everyone knows that normal space combat can become monotonous at times and this ship eliminates that for the most part. Being able to effortlessly change between these two archetypes takes a bit of the monotony out of the combat. Instead of clumsily chasing after five different interceptors that are all using evasive maneuvers, you can pop into Strike Suit mode and take them down with ease

Adios Corvettes!

Outside of the Strike Suit, you’re unfortunately not going to find too much in ship choices. There are a total of four ships you end up unlocking, all of which are fairly uninteresting in comparison to the Strike Suit. You can tell that a lot of time was put into the design of the Strike Suit, and while looks great and is a blast to play with, it would be nice to switch it up once in awhile with some other ships that are comparably cool to the Strike Suit. Instead, we’re left with a rather drab selection that lack both graphically and mechanically compared to the Strike Suit. This was also a demerit on replay value for me, as I’m not excited at all to play with any of the other ships.

You can see here how lame this ship looks in comparison to the Strike Suit.
Thankfully, they make up for it with that badass planetscape.

I went into this game expecting Freelancer 2.0, which is my own foolish fault, but it sort of skewed my view initially. When it comes down to it, if you’re looking for an arcade space fighter game, Strike Suit Zero will be right up your alley. My only recommendation is to go into it with your eyes wide open; you’re not going to explore, you’re not going to customize, and you’re going to die a lot. When is Star Citizen coming out again?

Check out some gameplay!