A third (and not yet final) entry for me to play from the helicopter war series, and there are no dramatic changes to report. Jungle Strike started in Washington DC and Urban Strike starts in the jungle, which is funny, but doesn’t make all that much difference. Yet as I played the latest restatement of the same ideas, shaped a tiny bit more effectively, I realised just how far ahead of its time the Strike series was. Part of that is in its continued use of jingoism filtered through the (increasing) ironic distance of schlock, which in Urban Strike extends to bringing back a previously killed villain as an initially new character via the narrative magic of plastic surgery. That both-ways narrative approach is not the most unusually forward-thinking, though.
Many of the games that I have played for Super Chart Island have been pretty much a straight path from A to B, an obstacle course of challenges for the player. Some have been much more open – the freedom of Sim City 2000 to do whatever you want is a different extreme, but even going right back to Jet Set Willy and Knight Lore you are free to explore and do things as you want, even if it’s one room at a time. Figuring out your own way through the world was a lot of the point, and a reward in itself. Any guidance on how to do so was quite limited.
Each stage of Urban Strike puts you in a huge sprawling location with freedom to do what you like, but the difference is the way it’s coupled with a similarly huge supporting infrastructure to tell you all of the things to do and where. You can just go around and blow up whatever you feel like, but you can also play with constant reference to the map and all of its detailed objective markers and blow up very specific things. The map gives you flashing dots for the locations of armour power-ups; you can fly to one of those and blow up the building that’s there and get your reward as expected. On the main missions of the first stage, as an example, you can go straight to picking up the cargo of telescope mirrors and head for the destination marked, trying to evade fire. Or you can scout it all out and clear it a bit first. Or do that and also reference the map and do all the power-ups and side stuff as you go, too.
You need never go unguided, which makes for a curious kind of combination of freedom and handholding which is a modern player feels very familiar. Your actions in Urban Strike don’t pop up achievement notifications whenever you do something, but it often feels like they could. The Ubisoft open-world games model of more recent times, of Watch Dogs and Assassin’s Creed and all, is almost already present and correct. Even the way that all of Urban Strike’s myriad of options ultimately boil down to picking stuff up or blowing stuff up is a starker version of a more recently familiar issue. This is an early glimpse of mainstream video games flying into a wall that they’re still not completely past.
All formats chart, Edge 016, January 1995