Soviet Strike makes it two game series which Super Chart Island has covered four games from. The first was FIFA 97, last entry. Both games are PlayStation best-sellers following on from games which did best on the Mega Drive, and both make a change to viewpoints which can move around within three dimensions where their predecessors had fixed isometric views. FIFA 97 is at most the end of the beginning in the FIFA story I’ll be telling, but Soviet Strike is an end, full stop, the last game in its series to enjoy this level of success. It’s also a much more fully realised game than FIFA 97, and that is exactly the problem.
In my post on Urban Strike, I talked about how its approach of being open to player choice within an extremely structured and minutely mapped framework was ahead of its time. It also makes for a great fit for the zeitgeist in the accelerating information age of the second half of the ‘90s. Getting real actors in to record video bits in the same cheesiness register as Command & Conquer is no big step forward for the series. But having the sequences place emphasis on data, on the cool factor of having instant access to names and profiles, is a wise choice. Following it through by having the in-game map and associated information screens go to short videos on what you’re doing with each mission is a better one still.
The heightened feeling of being at the centre of information warfare is an improvement in Soviet Strike. Others are thin on the ground. What you spend your time doing is still going around the map in a helicopter shooting things and picking up convenient ammo, fuel, people, etc.. The move to proper 3D means that you can choose a camera view which follows the helicopter rather than being fixed, giving a different view on turning. But the helicopter doesn’t have any more genuine access to the third dimension than it ever did in any of the previous games. You can’t rise up to escape or come down to get more involved. You just hover a little above the ground, being able to pass over some enemies being about the only thing separating the firefighting from Commando.
With the way things were going, Granite Bay had no choice but to put Soviet Strike in fuller 3D or look hopelessly behind the times. The graphics lose some of the immaculate precision of its predecessors in the process, but the change goes well enough that it feels like playing the same game. And that’s exactly why it’s so underwhelming. Other game series used the new possibilities of technology to show new ways to be in 3D, sometimes taking on some of the same approaches as previous Strike games. As poorly executed as much of FIFA 97 is, it was really exciting to see something new that had once been impossible. Soviet Strike sticks with what it already had mastered, and hovers so close to the familiar that the blue skies of possibility may as well not exist.
