Halo has a rich universe, and room for many spinoffs. This is the second of two twin-stick shooters that were originally released for smart devices, and it works quite well… probbaly even better if you’re familiar with Halo 4, which I’m not.
The previous game in this mini-series, Spartan Assault, had two named stars. That’s all I know about it. Strike’s star is a nameless and voiceless Spartan IV, and the whole game is a virtual reality simulation of past events. This undercuts the experience a tad, but I guess it contextualises the premise of multiple playthroughs of levels to improve your score or achieve optional objectives, not that that was at all necessary.
Strike made an attempt to endear itself to me initially with stages set during the opening phase of Halo 2, my favourite and the last game in the series that I played. In a bait-and-switch, it then very quickly jumps ahead to a time period around 4, introducing the Prometheans from that game (a faction of rogue Forerunner constructs… I think) as well as all their associated weapons and mechanics. Being thrown in the deep end, I felt like I was being punished for not staying up to date with the series and scrambled to learn the new enemy behaviours, gun mechanics, and also the names of everything: important for the optional objectives.
The playing experience was satisfying though; much like the main FPS games, they do a good job varying the objectives and level layouts, as well as throwing in the occasinal vehicle section. But I couldn’t help but feel the plot being stretched thin as every stage’s driving force boiled down to “get the magical MacGuffin back from the Covenant/Prometheans” or “stop them from getting the MacGuffin back from you”.
You have a lot of different abilities in the game: shoot, throw grenade, switch weapons, armour ability, interact with stuff. Combined with the fact that the action is quite zoomed out, the screen can feel both cramped and hard to read, with a complex control scheme. Switching from my phone to a tablet improved this immensely, and also reorganised the layout of on-screen controls to make them more manageable.
Spartan Strike, to its credit, manages to feel like an authentic Halo instalment. From some brief research, it seems like I would have been much better off trying its predecessor (no Prometheans, a more substantial story), but both have been delisted from platforms I own. Boo.
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