Air Strike Patrol for SNES
Review #24
Air Strike Patrol
Desert Strike with horrible controls
Gameplay
Weird controls. The isometric movement is relative to the direction you're facing, so doing a 180 turn requires you to turn 90 degrees with one d-pad direction and then the other 90 degrees with a different d-pad press. Not intuitive.
Turning is painfully slow as well.
Map is useless since it doesn't show your location!
No way to know what your target is. No indicator. The objective of the first mission is to destroy all radar sites and I blew up what looked like two sets of radar dishes but I didn't get credit for having completed any of the mission. There were a bunch of buildings around the dishes...maybe I was supposed to destroy those?
Run out of gas and ammo almost immediately.
Cursor on ground shows where your shots will hit but it's so close to the edge of the screen that you don't have time to react. So you have to fly over it and return for another run and make your best guess about when to start shooting. You can slow down but then you get pummeled with unavoidable damage.
Shooting is unforgiving which leads to a ton of wasted ammo
Level Design
The levels are broken up into missions which require multiple sorties to complete. The sorties happen over the same battlefield so you're visiting the same place repeatedly. Again it's hard to interpret the map so completing a mission feels daunting. I wasn't able to complete one anyway.
Theme
I like the idea - it's Desert Strike in an F-15. The setting is nice and the presentation is very militaristic. Looks and feels like a proper sim but with some action-oriented gameplay.
Art Style
Nice visuals. The field of battle has nice details and a lot of moving sprites. Performance is good as well.
Audio
Good music and sounds. The voice samples are incredibly muffled tho. In fact a lot of the sounds are garbled.
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