Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf (1992)

Preface:

Another Genesis I've heard come up from time to time but never actually played myself. Actually I haven't played many helicopter games in my life, Choplifter possibly being the only one. Regardless, the game does look like it could be fun in an arcadey sort of way.

Gameplay, Story and Value:

Desert Strike has you piloting your helicopter around a sandy beachfront, where you must take out various structures and save allies, all while keeping your chopper repaired, gassed up and stocked on ammunition. You're given you list of objectives, as well as a map of where to find them, which removed any unnecessary headaches from actually playing the game. In addition, your map will also show you where any fuel and ammo containers are, as well as missing agents you can return to an extraction point to regain any lost armor.

The chopper itself controls as you'd expect, and flying around the coast is pretty fun. Each of your three different weapons is mapped to a different face button, and each has their uses. Machine guns are good at handling soldiers and base camps, Hydra's deal with light turrets and medium ground threats like trucks or grounded planes, and Hellfires will tear apart structures. Finding an ammo crate will restore ALL your weapons to full capacity, so some thought should be put into when you should actually pick them up.

Aiming is a little odd, as there seems to be some basic lock-on mechanics but you still need to put yourself at just the right distance from the target for it to work, if it works at all. Once all the objectives are complete, you'll move on to the next campaign, of which there are four total.

Presentation, Music and Sound:

There's not a ton to look at in Desert Strike. Sprites and landscapes are bland and boring, animations are okay, and sometimes you'll have a hard time discerning the allies you need to rescue from the backgrounds they're emerging from. Aside from that last one, there's nothing particularly detracting either. Everything works fine for the most part, and it's pretty easy to tell what's going on.

The sound helps with your awareness, as each event has it's own easily identifiable sound effects. You'll hear a sound if you're actually hitting your target, or if a foot troop is shooting at you, or if you just blew up your own ammo crate. If it weren't for these sound effect it would actually be a lot harder to tell exactly what was going on at any point in the game. That side, while functional, they're not particularly exciting.

Aside from the title screen and opening sequence, music is completely absent from Desert Strike.

Afterthoughts:

I'd be hard pressed to call Desert Strike a "bad" game. It's a fun little arcade distraction with enough difficulty to keep me trying. That said, it's certainly not among my favorite games on the console, but the experience it provides is unique enough that I could see myself picking it up again at some point.

Review:

Gameplay: