A year after the first gulf war ended a lunatic general named Kilbaba has taken over a country in the Middle East. He threatens the western world and the US with nuclear weapons, you have been chosen by the president to terminate Kilbaba and his army forever. To your help you have a specially designed attack helicopter, AH-64D (also named Apache).

Obviously the story is inspired by the first Gulf War, and maybe the story has become even more current in these troubling days. Overall the story is quite nice, the missions fit in nicely and ranges from taking out radar bases, rescuing downed pilots and capturing enemy generals.

Most of the fighting is against ground forces firing at you, anti aircraft guns and surface to air missiles. At your disposal you have three different weapons; stingers, hydras and the machine gun. The stingers are heat seeking and very powerful while the hydras are more difficult to hit with and less powerful. To mop up enemy infantry or lighter vehicles you can use the machine gun.

Learning to control the helicopter and use the different weapons is quite easy. It’s mostly a matter of flying and firing. The maps are scattered with ammo, armor and fuel that you can collect when needed.

Graphically Desert Strike looks old, the pixels are big and the colors basic. It’s sometimes hard to see the difference between friendly troops and the enemy because of the very similar colors they have. The explosions are as you might expect from a 12-year-old-game.

The sound effects aren’t that great either, actually worse than the graphics. All though the stinger missile sounds powerful the machine-gun sounds like a stapler. However the menu music is kind of catchy.

What you also notice from a 12-year-old game is the difficulty level, yes games is much easier these days than 10 years ago. The first mission takes time to go through, and later ones are almost impossible to complete.

Desert Strike is an easy to grasp no frills action game. You will probably be disappointed of the graphics (or get a wave of nostalgic emotions) but if you like challenges this game is for you.

Requirements:
N/A
Tested on:
Pentium 4 2.4 GHz, 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon Graphics Card