Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut is pushy. This space shooter all but wrecks its occasionally thrilling dogfighting action by never, ever knowing when enough is enough. The game is a prime example of kitchen-sink game design, assuming that if one white-knuckle tumble against a dozen enemy spaceships is good, then waging that exact same battle many times in succession during each and every mission must be flat-out fantastic. In reality, of course, this relentless approach chafes. It wears at your patience almost from the very beginning, to the point where the monotony soon makes you long to do something livelier.

The premise is a traditional space opera saga. The year is 2299, and you play a voiceless spaceship jockey named Adams, who gets into the civil war raging between Earth and rebellious human colonies just as the colonials are about to go all Death Star on the homeworld. The story is intriguing; not everything is spelled out in the beginning, leaving a lot of open questions about the mysterious alien tech that sparked the war, as well as about your fascinating allies, one of which is an enigmatic humanlike AI. There is no shortage of tension created by the threat to Earth--tension dramatically underlined in the fiery remains of a planet that serves as the backdrop to the campaign's second mission.

Most of Strike Suit Zero is stripped down in comparison to more lavish space shooters of days gone by. There are no extravagant load-out option screens, no recreation decks to relax in with your fellow pilots, or even animations during the mid-mission visual transmissions from allied vessels (in the future, everyone is apparently a ventriloquist). The main plus here is being able to play from either a first-person cockpit point of view or from an external trailing camera. Ship models are bland, with little in the way of detail, and mission backdrops are mostly static scenes that are stylish and atmospheric, but still limited in impact, like the matte paintings in old Star Trek episodes. This is a plain Jane game made up for the prom.

Only the soundtrack rises above the waterline of mediocrity here, thanks to futuristic tunes that come off like mash-ups of the musical scores from Blade Runner and the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. There is a vaguely Eastern vibe to the music, along with echoing choral odes and never-quite discernible chants of exotic words. The only odd thing about the music is its slightly distant sound. Instead of being front and center in the mix like the usual game soundtrack, the score here is somewhat buried, as if you were cruising around listening to the universe's top 40 station on the FM dial.

Sometimes, simple is better. Maintaining focus on frantic space battles that move quickly and wrap up before you have time to regret what you're playing would have made Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut more energetic and compelling. Piling on enemies and tossing in the Transformers-inspired ship just clogs up what could have been a charming, if deeply predictable, space shooter.