Strike Vector is a terrible name. It's an ugly, meaningless pairing of words, vaguely aggressive and speciously technical. What does it tell about the experience in this multiplayer sci-fi dogfighter? Presumably, things will be struck. Usually walls, as it turns out. Other things will be set into motion and given a direction. Usually you, and usually into walls.
That's part of the Strike Vector equation,and for the first few hours, the unwieldiness of the interface and controls seems well in step with the asperity of the game's title. You furrow your brow at the shoddy tutorial, and at the misspellings in the menus. In your first matches, you hurtle from your spawn headlong into nearby obstacles like Wile E. Coyote shot from an Acme cannon. As you're puzzling over what the Kebs column next to your increasingly negative kill-to-death ratio might mean, a dubious name like Strike Vector is emblematic. Dogfighting combat is turned on its head by the ability to hover.Perhaps 1995's WipEout could have served as a precedent for a title with embedded significance. The old sci-fi racing stalwart used to run advertisements featuring two vacuous youths with nosebleeds. Below a stylized Designers Republic logo that oozed counterculture cred read the caption "A dangerous game." They used to say that the capitalized "E" stood for the drug ecstasy. Strike Vector has something of that uniquely '90s sensibility, perhaps owing to the members of WipEout's now-defunct Studio Liverpool within its ranks. It's got the same disaffinity for limitations on speed and gravity and the same aficionado appeal. It bears the same muddy industrial patina of the WipEout prototype from the movie Hackers. The old teenage angst even bubbles to the surface here and there; the new development team's name, Ragequit, sits in the spot reserved for the "Leave Match" button in more...let's say, "businesslike" shooters.
Strike Vector has no qualms about taking its speedy vector ships and forcing them into cramped quarters.
WYSIWYG: it's refreshing to not have equipment locked behind an experience system. Strike Vector's old-school sensibilities run deeper than a bit of branding. Though it's a dogfighting game fought between futuristic jets, it's structured in a manner that should be instantly familiar to Quake veterans. Absent are the unlocks and the tiered bonuses so endemic to the modern shooter scene. Eight weapons greet you when you first visit the game's armory, and the count remains eight a few hundred games later. The only unlocks earned through play are cosmetic. The arena shooter comparisons gain further credibility when your jet's Macross-esque hover mode is toggled, and the game becomes a first-person shooter (or a third-person shooter) in a purer sense. Hovering can make you an easier target, but it also inverts the traditional pursuer-chaser dynamic of flight games. Find a bogey on your six, and the options avail themselves. Hit the brakes and have him fly right by? Or maybe dive into a nearby structure and wait in ambush around a corner? It's a fitting evolution--the trench warfare that preceded the rise of the modern FPS gives way to the trench run from Star Wars.
Strike Vector has no qualms about taking its speedy vector ships and forcing them into cramped quarters. Open air cedes space to massive works of industrial architecture: slums, fortresses, and foundries that tend to come crashing into view when you're in the throes of desperate evasive maneuvers. It's a relatively small sampling of maps, but there's good variety to be had in their aesthetics and layouts, and each is tuned to pitch-perfect gameplay possibility. Considering the "tutorial" is what new players see first, this ain't a great way to lead off.I'm enamored of these stages, more layered and detailed than any flight game fan has a right to expect. They feel like rare artifacts that survived the journey from concept art to execution, chock-full of little protrusions and crannies that make escape both viable and precarious in turn. I find myself getting caught up in my eagerness to explore their depths, taking in the neon signage and the bright paint jobs, becoming inattentive to teammates and enemies as I loaf about. The finer details are hard to appreciate in the heat of combat, you see--the flips and loops that combat necessitates make these environments disorienting, even if it's in the best possible way. It's a savvy combination of form and function, a design that shifts from artwork to obstacle to pathway with nary a seam in between.
There's no leading crosshair, and it's difficult to tell what effect--if any--your shots are having when you score that elusive hit marker.
Strike Vector's combat is a delightfully grungy spectacle in its own right. It's most reminiscent of Warhawk's aerial combat, all floating power-ups and hi
