Strike Suit Zero Review

This text is not really about Strike Suit Zero.

At first glance, Strike Suit Zero seemed like a decent game, but soon I gave up. I couldn’t spend more than an hour and a half in it. Attempts to come back and play SSZ for at least a couple more hours ended in complete failure time after time.

And yet, I sincerely wanted something space-related, but specifically about ships. When was the last time we were given something truly worthwhile on this topic?

At least in such a intimate format, like our Suit Zero, when you are simply given a ship and sent to blow things up in space. With upgrades, various guns, and the like. It’s been a long time since there was anything meaningful! That’s why Strike Suit Zero seemed like a decent game.

In the first 43 minutes, I managed to learn the basics of piloting spacecraft and completed two missions. These 43 minutes felt like three hours. SSZ has this well-known negative dynamic for every active gamer. Ideally, you play for five hours straight, promise yourself the last fifteen minutes and sleep, and then play for another seven hours because you’re hooked. Here, it’s the opposite – you lost half an hour, and you’re already full and drained, not that you don’t like the game, but you’re just tired of the local gameplay.

After finishing the first session, I promised myself to definitely continue studying SSZ the next day because now I’m really lazy to go through it, but overall it’s not bad. I think I remembered how to switch things, what rockets are for, and how to control it. The next day it turned out that nothing like that is true, and oh my god, I just don’t want to learn all this again. No way.

Strike Suit Zero didn’t make it comfortable for a casual player who plays for half an hour a day to remember anything. The weapon selection screen before the third mission, where I left off last time, left me puzzled. How do these guns work exactly? What’s best for the next mission? Do I really need that upgrade? I don’t remember! I don’t know! And I didn’t know!

It always throws me off. My second “Dota” didn’t require as much as all these little things that can be thrown at you in a second. Try, they say, to stuff a whole Big Mac into yourself at once.

So you’re talking to a friend, and then he starts: “Imagine this, you’re flying in space, you get a target, you have to lock on, and to hit with a laser machine gun, you have to shoot ahead, and they show you a marker where to shoot, but there’s a machine gun that doesn’t require shooting ahead, and there are big ships that need special missiles, and you can dodge missiles with controls, but you have to do it at the last moment, and you accelerate with shift, but the acceleration runs out, and to chase the ships, you have to reduce speed, and the shields don’t recover immediately, and there are also ally bots, and if you don’t fully kill a ship, they can count it as an assist, and you get fewer points for that, and then it becomes harder to get upgrades and medals, and new ships are unlocked with medals, there you go.”

Well, it’s a cool game, isn’t it?

This is some kind of wrong approach. Where are my ten missions for the starting ship with starting guns, but in space of different colors and different combat conditions? Okay, five. With a completely colorful space, meteor fields, orbital probes, and magnetic storms.

Strike Suit Zero thinks I’m Neo from “The Matrix” and I’ll immediately remember the load of information about the action that was recently loaded into my brain. Ha, if only. 43 minutes of yesterday’s opera “Imagine this, you’re flying in space…” are compressed into thirty seconds of back-and-forth through the starting-briefing menus, and once I’m on the mission, I can’t even find the right buttons right away, what alternative firing modes are there for specific vessels.

I will receive my five missions with one automatic and standard rockets, whether you want it, you space creature, or not.

Or so I thought until it turned out that I had to quickly paddle with all available shovels at once. Well, because the game is designed to be dynamic and cool, to have a diverse battle.

As a result, three times in a row, I rushed into a crowd of enemies like a disabled person, somehow killed a few planes, performed expected maneuvers once or twice, died on the fifth minute of the mission, and that was enough. I don’t know how to play properly, I’m not allowed to learn comfortably, starting from scratch is completely lazy, and playing the mission as it is now is not fun or interesting.

***

It was getting dark. The potential of space action in Strike Suit Zero was not revealed. Or maybe it was, but the light of complex fast battles on X-wing fighters was so concentrated that it first blinded me, and then burned a hole in my head, and now I can neither see it nor comprehend it.

As much as I am afraid of this word, I want to call SSZ gramophanism. Well, from game design. You can’t serve games with such a thick mess, we casual players won’t understand, we won’t understand at all.

The only digestible scenario in which Strike Suit Zero can justify its $10 seems to me to be a continuous six-hour gaming session, in order to appreciate and understand everything in one big immersion, so that it can squeeze out the initial enthusiasm from me, the game lasted a notorious 43 minutes…