Urban Strike

"How anyone could consider this game fit for release is beyond me."

Writing a review on a game you only played for a couple of days isn't a very responsible thing to do, I know. But if the said game is so universally lacklustre that you had enough of it after a couple of hours, another day's worth of critical analysis while waiting for it to grow on you is the most that can be expected of an unpaid reviewer. I tried to keep an open mind about it, too, regardless of the first impression, but the more I played, the more obvious it was that Urban Strike has nothing going for itself at all and that playing it any longer would just make me hate it more.

First of all, all of you who couldn't get enough of the preceding two Strikes, Desert and Jungle, and are looking for another fix, look elsewhere (at the end of this review, for instance). Urban Strike was developed by a new programming group and while that happens a lot with sequels and doesn't necessarily affect the new game's quality, it's clear that Black Pearl weren't up to the job. Right from the start, the game feels decidedly different than the previous two, and this fact alone isn't going to make the old fans very happy (I'm not one of them, mind). But once they discover just how huge of a misstep Urban Strike really is, they are going to be extremely disappointed.

Putting it bluntly, Urban Strike looks and sounds awful. The graphics are a combination of traditional pixel art and digitised effects, and the two don't mix well at all. The explosions, for instance, look so pathetic that I soon lost all interest in blowing up stuff for fun - a terrible thing to happen in a game made for this very purpose. The traditional graphic elements are not such a catastrophe; in fact, this is the most colourful (rather too colourful for my taste, actually) and the best animated 16-bit Strike...but not without a price. While the previous two games only slowed down when the action got really intense, Urban Strike is slow and choppy by default and if there are more than a couple of sprites on the screen, the number of frames per second can routinely be measured in single digits. This is nothing short of scandalous and if I paid the full price for the game, I'd definitely feel ripped off.

Though there are a number of composers that did wonders even on 8-bit consoles, I try to be as tolerant as possible of music in cartridge-based games; there's only so much you can do with MIDI - I know, I'm a musician myself. Urban Strike, however, really tested the limits of my patience with its main theme, er, menu tune - so much so that I often chose not to re-map the controls in order to minimise the exposure to it. Not that it made too much of a difference; someone decided that the controls were too customisable in previous Strikes and my preferred scheme is missing from this one. The music in the intro is more subdued and more bearable because of it, but then the intro itself is bad enough: it's overblown, yet trivial and very poorly done, again mixing drawn and digitised images to a disastrous effect.

Even if Urban Strike boasted brilliant, revolutionary gameplay, it would be difficult to give it a positive mark after all this - but since there are no changes for the better, I'm spared many a sleepless night. It seems that the developers again only added things and not even occasionally bothered to check whether these additions resulted in any kind of an improvement over the game's predecessors. This way, they included more vehicles but again failed to properly adapt the controls and made the map - still the only source of information - considerably more detailed but at the same time practically unreadable. The single biggest shortcoming this time as far as gameplay is concerned, however, is the overabundance of items. If I felt that Desert Strike was in part too difficult because of the limited ammo capacity and a very small fuel tank, Urban Strike overcompensates for that by giving you too much of everything, both initially and through power-ups: you can hardly destroy anything without revealing fuel drums, ammo crates or toolboxes. All the while, though, old complaints about the gameplay remain unchecked. There is still no altitude control even though the fact that the strafe control was moved to the X button permanently now leaves both shoulder buttons available. Furthermore, the enemy can still shoot at you from beyond the edge of the screen and the stiff, unresponsive controls (probably linked to the general slowdown) make the projectiles harder to escape than ever. At least the gunners are somewhat smarter this time round, wiping out more threatening targets first - if you're facing in the right direction, that is (yes, it's still the only way to aim).

Urban Strike is a failure, plain and simple. Desert Strike was a flawed but promising whereas its two sequels did nothing but expand on its shaky foundations without ever addressing its core problems. Urban Strike finally collapses under its own weight with the game engine unable to handle all the graphical polish, which makes the game look ugly and garish anyway - and this paradox is essentially indicative of the rest of the game, as well. If you're looking for a similar experience, you won't go wrong with Desert Fighter/Air Strike Patrol: it's a superior game in just about every respect.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 11/10/05, Updated 11/11/05