It’s a real new space flight sim, but will it fill that hole in your heart?
When the golden age of the space flight simulator ended over a decade ago, it really, really ended. In the 90s, space flight was as legitimate a genre as the FPS or strategy, but seemingly overnight we stopped seeing new entries in it.
That, I believe is an embarrassment for the gaming industry. Folks who grew up loving the genre, like myself, we’re suddenly left without one of our favorite types of game during our gaming prime. To date, Star Wars: Tie Fighter is still considered to be one of the best games ever made, but the imitators are few and far between now in an era in which we even get a new fully featured 4x space strategy game every year or so.
Kickstarter may have corrected this problem, as it has resulted in the funding of an independent space sim called Strike Suit Zero from Born Ready Games that landed on Steam last week. Demand for this game was not insignificant, as its Kickstarter, which was needed to complete the project rather than initiate it, rolled in nearly $175k, and the game passed through the Steam Greenlight process. Now we have it and can decide if it gives us new hope for the space sim genre.
As somebody who has long been weak for this kind of content, I think it does, but it also lays bare at least one way in which the genre must change in order to become successful again in the current gaming climate.
Strike Suit Zero begins in a fairly standard manner, with you in a ship that flies around space and blows things up. This single-pilot craft is standard for the genre, as if flyers straight ahead and you can make it go faster or slower or whatever. But there are twists. For one, your initial craft can be armed with five different types of weapons, from a machine gun that is good against fighter shield to a plasma cannon that is more effective against armor to a whole host of different missile types, and you must switch between these on the fly during battle in order to be any good at this game at all. Too, you have shields that regenerate and armor that does not.
About three missions in, though, your craft changes. You still have standard flight mode, but you also have Strike Suit mode, in which you transform into a robot that moves very slowly but can auto target and has weapons that are far more effective than the standard ones. Life as a Strike Suit, though, is short and limited and is only necessary when you need to take out a whole bunch of targets that are close together very quickly, such as when an emey corvette is tossing torpedoes at your allies like they’re going out of style.
The Strike Suit initially to me seemed banal, as I really just wanted to play a normal space sim, but it truly allows for new wrinkles in large-scale battles, and it lets the developers throw more stuff at you than you would normally be able to handle, making for more frantic battles than we’ve ever seen before. That’s a good thing.
But Strike Suit Zero has a flaw that we definitely would not have considered one fifteen years ago. In days gone past, failing a mission meant starting the whole thing over, and we took that for granted. In hindsight, that sucked, but that’s just how it was. Today, we don’t want to lose twenty minutes of game progress because the ship we were escorting was unable to defend itself in any way, and Born Ready acknowledges that by inserting mid-mission checkpoints. But said checkpoints are far too rare, leaving us to lose ten minutes instead of twenty. Hopefully, the checkpoints will be adjusted in a patch so we lose only five, which would seem tolerable.
The game takes place within the framework of an original science fiction story. Earth is fighting a war against its colonies, who just want their independence. The opening cutscene seems to paint the colonists are the plucky rebels fighting against an evil empire, but when you start the game you’re an Earth pilot. Hmmmmmm.
It turns out that the colonists have obtained a superweapon and they’re hellbent on destroying Earth with it. Yep, this story is appropriately epic. And it’s decently well told, as the game is fully and capably voiced.
And it’s all so very pretty, though the biggest sign that this is an independent production is that the textures aren’t as high res as you would hope for. Don’t expect this to look as good as EVE Online. Despite that, it’s still a properly current-gen game in terms of technical details.
Strike Suit Zero is an engrossing experience, and one that genre veterans will undoubtedly find pleasing and familiar, even with a new wrinkle that changes up the formula a bit. That it can be played with mouse and keyboard, gamepad or joystick is a plus, and perhaps makes it more accessible. You’ll come out of this game remembering why you liked space sims to begin with, and it’ll leave you longing for more. May this be a sign of things to come.
