Strike Vector is a terrible name. It's an ugly, meaningless pairing of words, vaguely aggressive and speciously technical. What does it tell about the experience in this multiplayer sci-fi dogfighter? Presumably, things will be struck. Usually walls, as it turns out. Other things will be set into motion and given a direction. Usually you, and usually into walls.
That's part of the Strike Vector equation,and for the first few hours, the unwieldiness of the interface and controls seems well in step with the asperity of the game's title. You furrow your brow at the shoddy tutorial, and at the misspellings in the menus. In your first matches, you hurtle from your spawn headlong into nearby obstacles like Wile E. Coyote shot from an Acme cannon. As you're puzzling over what the Kebs column next to your increasingly negative kill-to-death ratio might mean, a dubious name like Strike Vector is emblematic.
Perhaps the ability to suspend flight necessitated these finely detailed environments.
What else is missing? A tactile sense, really--a feeling of connection between player and game that bypasses all the little mechanical and electrical intermediaries. There are a lot of barriers: the dubious ability of mouse and keyboard to simulate acrobatic flight, for one. The inputs have never struck me as an ideal control system for aircraft simulation, but Strike Vector's half-baked controller support makes them the only practical option. The crosshairs used for targeting also initiate turns--they need to be moved to the edges of the screen to do so--meaning that during pursuit, you're stuck juggling your ability to attack or steer. If you manage to draw a bead on your enemy, you might find it tough to gauge your weapon's efficacy. There's no leading crosshair, and it's difficult to tell what effect--if any--your shots are having when you score that elusive hit marker. Absent the ability to tell whether you're using the weapons properly, fitting your vector becomes a matter of sticking to the one or two that have proven remotely viable.
Then again, I might be willing to take to the skies without any weapons fastened to my unwieldy ship, to jet around Strike Vector's impressive environments and let the chips fall where they may. There's a substantive quality to the game's core combat and visuals, even if the rest remains somewhat clumsy. Each time you quit the game, an exit splash screen reminds you that future content is free, and the first such drop is promised for February 28. I'll fill the time until then learning how to stop crashing into the very pretty walls.
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