Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut

It's one of those hidden gems in Steam especially for mecha fans like me. It's quite short so you can definitely complete this on a weekend. At first the controls need getting used to (I recommend using m+kb) but eventually it'll feel like a trance like experience as you dash through enemies and change into a mech to release a full missile barrage. I just realized that this game was released in 2014.. THERE SHOULD BE A SEQUEL BY NOW!!! Also, does anyone know where the hell is the supposedly included art book in this version?

Works flawlessly in the Steam Deck

Slept on this for years. Glad I finally got around to playing it. All around great game if you like Mecha's or arcade space shooters.

So you take the weird, uncanny universe and aesthetic of Homeworld, and cram Macross into it. Those are the two strongest vibes I've ever gotten from this game. The music? Homeworld. The suits? Macross. The dialogue? Homeworld. The artstyle? Macross. I mean, listen to the soundtrack of this game, then listen to Homeworld's. Watch the strike suit transform, then look up a veritech fighter transforming. peak gameplay too.

As long as you go into this expecting a short game, the experience is an explosive action-packed movie which you replay for higher scores. Like Star Fox 64 without the animals and with missions on huge open space maps in a power-fantasy universe where you have the only awesome transforming mech and everyone else is fodder. This being the Director's Cut means a few tweaks have been made and also you get the DLC content as part of the package, but not the Infinity version which should have been included. I haven't played any of the others, but I can recommend this one. We begin in a universe split between two factions: the Earth forces who think they run everything, and the Colonial planets which get treated like an evil empire despite how badly they were wronged in the past while just wanting to be free. The plot keeps saying the Colonials are the bad guys, but I actually prefer the bad ending where they get the last laugh. You play as an ace Earth pilot who got punished for your mysterious amnesia, so now you're back in flight school and doing chores. But this gets you and another rule-breaker sent to a mysterious facility where an omniscient cyborg gifts you a super-ship that can switch to humanoid mode with the energy from shooting down enemies, ie adrenaline I guess. From there, you fight in a series of battles that eventually lead to saving Earth maybe. Combat starts in standard fighter-plane mode where you have two primary weapons and some number of secondary weapons. The primaries are an energy rifle where careful aiming is required and you can run out temporarily as the battery recharges, and a machine gun with limited ammo which auto-hits your lock on target in a wide area ahead of you. Use the former against stationary targets and large ships, then the latter on the highly maneuverable small ships. You also unlock a beam laser eventually but it seems to miss a lot. Secondaries include a broad selection of high-powered rockets and guided missiles; the guidance systems aren't very impressive so I generally used the dumb rockets, or the “Fire and Forgets” which shoot quickly and continue chasing until they hit some target. There's also a few big and slow missiles which can be useful against large targets. Ships often have two or more slots for secondaries, and you can select the same type in both to start with more ammo. When a transforming ship has enough energy, you can switch to the humanoid mecha Strike mode. You transform, your forward movement stops, you can now dash in any direction using the thrusters, and you can auto-turn toward your next target. Ammo is always infinite for Strike mode and the guns tend to become stronger in some way, so you can simply mash buttons in a burst of hyper-deadly action until the super energy meter runs out. That feeling of transforming into Strike mode and letting the auto-aim take over as you dart around destroying everything with stronger guns and missile circus spam is what this game exists for. It's amazing the first time and remains pretty good as you keep learning how best to use it, such as first transforming amid many small ships for the short range fast gun, or using another Strike ship's long range to snipe mid-size ships, or deciding between guns or missiles depending on your targets. There are other tactical choices to be made in the battles, though the tutorial mission didn't do a great job explaining. The target priority system gave me a lot of trouble at first; some missions absolutely require this greater battlefield awareness. What they tell you is that you can select the nearest target, or a target that's in or near your crosshairs. But before you do that, you should scroll through the target priority groups to decide what to focus on, such as capital ships over small fighter craft, or torpedoes when you need to protect an ally ship, or whatever the mission commander tells you is important. If you set priority to torpedoes and destroy them all, the name is grayed out until more appear and you'll target other stuff, perfect for running them down the moment they get fired. One minor flaw is the game cannot seem to decide how to mark your targets. Sometimes they use a white circle which turns red when you're in range, and might have a hard-to-see dotted ring to show you should fire from elsewhere because something is in the way. Or they use a white box (which doesn't change color if you are in or out of range) with markings inside that look crossed out (to me they look like “Don't Fire Here” when in fact you should) but those do a really nice thing where they are grayed out if you need to fly around. Mission medals remain almost completely mysterious to me. Sometimes I would do okay and get the highest medal, and sometimes I would try my hardest and not even get the lowest medal. There are possibly some missions where you can't score well the first time because the next-gen unlockable ships are only available after one success. Mission completion time seems to have the largest factor on the final score, but they don't tell you what's the best time. Restarting a section at a checkpoint will penalize your final time, though at least you get full health and ammo. The game has 13 main story missions, plus 5 optional “simulator” missions. At the end of each main story mission, you might unlock a new weapon, or a new ship which you can use if you replay a completed mission, or an upgrade for the first Strike ship if you complete side objectives. I liked how the simulator missions actually work as tutorials for advanced tactics, and suggest basic ships and weapons to use which gives you a feel for how tough this war is on the normal pilots. You can choose from Easy to Hard difficulty on any mission, and Normal difficulty was decently challenging. As for the plot and characters, they're kind of just people who talk at you occasionally and give orders or suggestions of how to win. A few of them have backstories which reveal everything you need to know about the big war going on: “Colonials are the bad guys for wanting freedom, so we committed war crimes to win a battle once, and now they're angry and will do whatever they need to win, so we have to fight desperately to survive.” At least some of the map scenery is cool. Overall, I had a great time playing this for the gameplay alone. Certain elements were confusing for a while, but they do become clear with time. The story experience left me wanting a more complex and interesting plot where I don't feel I'm fighting on the wrong side, though I prefer having any plot to none. Try this for the epic Strike mode combat!

very Macross very arcade like

imagine getting shot, but the game targets ONLY SPACE JUNK

As always a bit of context first: I got introduced Strike Suit Zero while watching a Leopard Extreme review over 10 years ago, and the 20 seconds there was enough to grab my attention... But it has taken me until now to [b]finally[/b] to get around on picking it up to try myself! The artstyle is very good and consequently has meant the game has aged pretty well as the devs didn't go for a ulta-realistic style - the cartoon-y one is really quite visually appealing. Furthermore, because this game came out 11-12 years ago - you can run a stable 1080/60fps at mostly-high settings on a iGPU (like the Radeon 780M) easily. Audio is also pretty good, especially explosions have a heft to them, and really makes getting kills very satisfying. The characters are well voiced and made me get connected to them which is a plus. Music was a bit hit and miss, but there was 1 battle track that really channelled my inner fighter pilot! Controls is really good on a keyboard and mouse, and it made piloting the ships easy and very enjoyable, and with creating a great build for both small and large ship encounters did cause me to do quite a bit of taunting while in dogfights; it's just so much fun fighting the ships! The story is simple but pretty good and made sense on [b]why[/b] I was doing what I was doing, and gave me a sense of reason to complete the campaign... Apparently according to a different review the story got reworked and re-voiced - since I don't know if this is true or not I'm no going to comment other then what I just said. However, there was 1 main thing that just irritated me on the last 1/3rd of the game: that being ship unlocking doesn't really make sense. I found that for new missions you only get a the initial set of ships from the start of the game (and for the last 1/2 you don't even get access to 3 of those starter ships), but if you return after-the-fact then all the ships the game has included are available. I wish Strike Suit took a piece out of Shattered Universe's book and gradually unlock the more powerful ships as you progress through the game to use in newly unlocked missions. [/olist] So in conclusion: despite these flaws I would still recommend Strike Suit Zero! I have yet to play the DLC but I cannot deny the dogfighting, the primary mechanic of the game, is really well polished and fun! There aren't many space dogfighting games around (to my knowledge), so I'm glad this one was well worth the wait on my part!

holy shoot this thing is intense and fun. but most importantly, you look HELLA COOL while flying around. Christ, the protagonist ride even has missiles named CIRCUS, that should tell you how it feels to fly this thing.

Macross type weapons with Top Gun type action.