Strike Vector – Review (PC)

Strike Vector – Review (PC)

At Gamescom last year, a little French indie developer called ‘RageQuit’ unveiled their first full-release game, Strike Vector. It was fast, explosive, and looked damn good. So I would say that I’ve been looking forward to this game since then.

I hate this game.

The gameplay videos on the Steam Store page don’t quite convey how unbelievably ‘twitchy’ this game is. In every engagement, you will have less than a second to kill them before they disappear of your screen. Also, other than the homing launchers, every weapon is incredibly accurate, forcing you to be incredibly accurate too… again, in less than a second.

I fucking hate this game not because it is ‘bad’, because…. it’s not; it’s actually a great game. It’s built on the shiny UDK 3, so it looks awesome yet doesn’t require you to have a super tricked out rig to max the graphics at 60fps. The customisation options for your ‘Vector’ are pretty cool too. You don’t need to play for hours to unlock any mandatory equipment, you start off with everything, so there’s no difference in ship between those that have played for ten minutes and those that have played for ten hours.

But the learning curve…. my god.

Because you and your target are flying so damn quickly, you have to have your sensitivity turned right up so you can line up a shot properly. Problem is, your weapons aren’t mounted squarely on your ship, they have room to pivot. This goes against everything I’ve known and played before in other dogfighting games, such as the Ace Combat series, the Battlefield series, Rogue Squadron and Planetside 2, where the guns are mounted to fire at a fixed position, leaving it up to you to get your enemy into your cross-hairs. Because the weapons in Strike Vector can move independently to your ship, you constantly have to worry about not only lining up a shot, but that your ship isn’t 100% following the direction that your cross-hair is pointing, and whilst you’re diving in and out of the complicated terrain, pulling break-neck turns without a care in the world AND trying desperately hard not to get shot yourself, throwing the added stress of “My ship is ten degrees apart from my guns and my target” is absolutely infuriating.

This problem only actually effects ‘first-person view’. So you’re now sitting there thinking “Just turn it to ‘third-person view’ and shut up!”, well clever-clogs, in third-person view, because your ship follows your cursor and that most of the turns you’ll be making are so tight, your nose/guns end up facing away from where your camera is centered; now add into this mix that your target just flew past you at a couple of hundred MPH and you should now see why not having your camera follow your cursor, like it does in FPS-mode, becomes a real disadvantage.

Also, you have eight weapons to choose from, ranging from LMG’s to Plasma Cannons. Thing is, as previously mentioned, none of the guns have any spread on them at all, most of them are semi-automatic! With the finite amount of time that you have to actually kill someone before they get you, having an armoury full of pin-point accurate rifles would not be my first choice. I personally choose the homing swarm launchers and a shotgun (you get two choices, of any combination of guns, btw). I choose these because I can spray with them.

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“Squeeze both triggers and pray”

“Cheap move”, “no skill”, “pro-noob”; yeah, I know, but I have never been one for sniper rifles in FPS’s, especially not ones where myself and my target are travelling at hundreds of miles an hour.

That being said however, your ship has the ability to ‘transform’ into a hover mode, drastically reducing your manoeuvrability, but allowing you to hover in a spot or slowly move around. This is great for those that are trying to line up that shot, but I’ve found that every time I slow down, I die, so I try to only use it for an ’emergency break’ when I’m about to go slamming face-first into something. Also, this function is used by a large amount of people in-game to camp. If you’re playing a team based mode, like TDM or Domination, it’s a favourite tactic of these people to fly over to your spawn, hover underneath it and instantly decimate anyone that spawns….

Which is nice…

That’s another point; Spawning. When you spawn, you are hurtled into the arena at max speed. This is pretty cool, but in some levels, when you go into them at max speed, you instantly crash into a wall or your ship scrapes the bottom of the runway because it shakes about because you’re going so fast. When you crash, as in careening into something, not blowing up from enemy fire, you don’t just get a ‘death’, you get minus one kill as well…

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I mean…. Come on now

It’s hard enough to get a kill as it is, but to have it removed from you just because you crashed seems unbelievably harsh, especially if you crashed due to bad level design!

Then again, the arenas themselves look great and are actually designed, for the most part, really well. The aesthetic of the game is very reminiscent of Hawken, another game built with the UDK and which I played a few hundred hours of (It’s really good, free and coming out on Steam soon 😀 ). The arenas’ environs are all very industrial, with large billowing factories and jutting aerials and pylons,

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specifically designed for you to fly straight into….

It is actually really exhilarating flying around the tight corners, darting in-between pipes and walkways, throwing your ship around a corner with barely enough space for you to get through. When you make those awesome feats of aero-acrobatics, it actually feels rewarding, not just because you didn’t crash, but that you pulled something off that was really awesome… it’s also doubly rewarding when the guy chasing you didn’t make it! >:D

As I said earlier, my real problem with the game is the stupidly high learning curve, but is that really a bad thing? Can I say that a game is ‘bad’ because it’s frustratingly hard? I don’t think so. Strike Vector is in the same ball park as Demons Souls for me. What games like these run the risk of, is that because they’re so hard it may alienate gamers who wanted to jump in and instantly start wrecking, which the vast majority of gamers just won’t be able to do, but then, surely this is a welcome sight to those that actually want a challenge in their games (and they will not be disappointed)!

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I still fucking hate this game though

Strike Vector is best advised for those that want a white-knuckle ride of high-explosives and supersonic jump-jets. Whilst infuriatingly difficult at first, this game does/will grow on you over time, but that is something you WILL have to give it; time. Lots of time. As you come crashing down to terra firma for the 400th time, you will also notice how awesome this game looks and runs. I have been greeted by the main page a few times mid-game due to servers randomly dropping me (probably because I’m too pro), I have seen no real glitches or bugs, which is very welcome after the amount of dodgy ‘Early Access’ games that we’ve played recently!

Pros

  • ‘Pros only’ This game is challenging to the extreme, and whilst the lack of any real reward in-game may not seem like quite an encouragement to play on, just mastering the mechanics of this game is reward enough.
  • Beautiful aerial landscapes and grim, dystopian, industrial aesthetics make for a great place for a dogfight
  • Every kill you get seems like a gift from the gods.

Cons

  • ‘Pros only’ This game is challenging to the extreme (lol), and will not sit well with those that were looking for a good ol’ fashioned dogfight as they knew it from other titles. I can totally see the difficulty of this game putting people off, in the same way that it does for Demons Souls
  • The tutorial basically just reads out the key bindings for you, and there is nowhere for you to practice with loadouts against a bot/target range. You are very much ‘chucked in at the deep end’.
  • You will rage-quit

Rating: 4 out of 5.
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