Steam Game Review | Vertical Strike: Endless Challenge

Hello aces, Ace Combat Fan here for my first ever game review and let's talk about
Vertical Strike: Endless Challenge a new game that's on Steam.
I've just recently bought it and played the game on a live stream for the first time,
so here's my review on Vertical Strike.
First, what is this game?
Vertical Strike is an arcade flight shooter game developed by Project ICKX running on
the Unity engine and alternate framework which was originally created by Project ICKX but
that feels really similar to Raider's Sphere and Ace Combat, although the graphics are
considerably better than the ones from Raider’s Sphere.
In this game you basically have two different survival missions where one of them is an
air-to-air mission and the other one is an air-to-ship mission.
As you play you have to defeat the incoming enemy waves and after defeating all the enemies
in that wave you go to the next wave and so on.
Also, every fifth wave consists of you fighting a boss, which is marked by as TGT, so you
will encounter these bosses in waves 5, 10, 15, 20 and so on, it's when you defeat these
bosses that you replenish some of your ammunition.
As for the score system of the game, it includes three components.
First is your regular score, meaning the points you get for shooting down enemies, the second
one is your cost, so how much your ammunition (or your flares) cost, and the last is the
result score which is basically your original score minus the cost of your ammunition.
Now let's talk about the pros and cons of this game starting with the pros: The two
aircraft available, the SAF-22, basically an F-22 with canards, and the XSF-3A, which
is a larger version of the Shinshin fighter currently in development in Japan, are very nicely modeled.
You can see their parts as they more and this is especially true when it comes to the thrust vectoring.
The graphics are also good around the aircraft when you hit the afterburners or when you
are maneuvering since you can see the vapour around the aircraft.
When it comes to weapons, in Vertical Strike each aircraft can carry up to 4 different
weapons and there plenty of choices going from your standard missiles to unguided bombs,
semi-active anti-air missiles, anti-ship missiles and even exterior mounted guns.
Of course all these weapons have their different specs and they become more important in the
anti-ship mission since you have to destroy both naval and aerial targets.
While not considered as weapon, flares are also available and they can be set to their
automatic or player controlled.
The gameplay in this game is action packed, it’s very fast and you will get to feel
like you are in Area B7R during the anti-air mission, needless to say the gameplay is also
fun as much as it is fast and the sound effects from the weapons systems really make you feel
like you are playing Ace Combat.
And talking about Ace Combat, Vertical Strike also has a pretty good music playing in the
background – while the music will keep on repeating I never got annoyed by it while
playing the game.
Another feature of this game is that after you die, because eventually you will die,
you can quickly upload your score via Twitter and see how you rank compared to other players.
The last pro of this game is that it comes at a great price of only 4.99 American dollars
or 498 yen in Japan.
Now let’s talk about the cons of this game: This game only has two flyable aircraft, the
SAF-22 and the XSF-3A as I mentioned before, and only two missions.
In the anti-air mission the only enemy that you will fight against is the Sukhoi 33 and
in the anti-ship mission the only enemies there are some destroyers and occasionally
some Sukhoi 33, what it changes is that the bosses in the naval mission are battleships
instead of destroyers.
Another drawback of the game is that it does not have a cockpit view, only the 3rd person
and HUD views.
Plot-wise, there’s nothing to talk about because the game does not have specific setting
explaining a story, the missions, the factions or your wingmen featured in the missions,
this is purely an arcade game.
The last con, and the one I dislike the most, is that I while you can play with a joystick,
such as an Xbox 360 controller, I have not been able to switch the controls with the options
from the game.
This frustrates me because I am so used to the Ace Combat's button layout that I cannot
play the game with a joystick so I have to find a walk around in order to fix this.
With that being said, I highly recommend that you try out Vertical Strike because it’s
a very fun game for the price you pay.
The game really feels like an Ace Combat mini-game and I think I will spend some of my time waiting
for Ace Combat 7 by playing this game.
Overall, the pros of this game make it really fun and there should be a way to fix the only
con that concerns me, the one about the joystick.
This was my review on Vertical Strike Endless Challenge, I hope you have enjoyed and please,
give this game a try – it’s pretty damn good!

Steam Game Review | Vertical Strike: Endless Challenge

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