David MacDonald
Connector Staff

“Strike Suit Zero” is a game that attempts to emulate a genre that hasn’t had much life in it recently, the fighter combat one.

It takes place many years in the future where humanity has achieved space faring status and war is being waged between Earth and the independent space colonies. Early on in the game, the colonials use a weapon to destroy the majority of the Earth forces’ fleet in one fell swoop, leaving the remaining forces to fight a battle with the odds stacked against them.  The only assistance that this rag tag fleet has is an A.I. called Control, and an experimental fighter that she created: the Strike Suit.

Despite that interesting set up, the story is paper thin in this game.  Characters receive little to no development, the conflict between Earth and the colonies is about as generic as it gets, and there’s very little context as to why you need to blow up all the conveniently red painted ships.  Though truth be told, the game seems much more interested in the gameplay aspect, which overall is much stronger.

The combat in “Strike Suit Zero” is well designed, if over complicated.  There’s buttons for boosting, changing missiles, boosting, deflecting missiles, changing your targeting changing cannons, and while this may not seem so bad, it can be tricky when you’re trying to keep flying at the same time.  The game itself can be very hard as you can run out of missiles fast and your main cannons can’t do too much damage on capital ships, which you will likely all use on capital ships while every last gun from here to Earth focuses on you.

That being said it is very satisfying once mastered.  There’s nothing like when you can boost towards and enemy fighter, gun it down then in the next second, unleash five dozen rockets onto a lone corvette.

While missiles are otherwise limited, the Strike Suit is capable of an alternate mode where it can launch countless missiles onto the same target.  It is by far the most satisfying part of the game.  In fact, any part of the game where you can manage to get your ship in just the right place and unloading your ordnance onto whatever is unfortunate enough to be on the business end.  There are very few experiences that can capture the Strike Suit Zero experience of zipping through space as everything explodes around you when it all comes together.

It can be very mechanically frustrating at times, but Strike Suit Zero does have moments worth playing for.  It’s worth picking up at the very least on a Steam Sale.