Armed Strike is an arcade styled, World War II combat game for your Windows Phone. You battle the Axis powers by air and sea, piloting a wide variety of aircraft and ships. Armed Strike has ten missions in a campaign mode, each with its own unique boss to defeat. Each mission can be replayed so you can try to better your score. The game also has OpenXLive support where you can log in and view an online leaderboard or access your OpenXLive Game Center.
Graphics are nice, game play challenging and if you like arcade styled combat games, Armed Strike is worth a try.
When you first launch Armed Strike, you'll be presented with the OpenXLive menu. You can log into your account, create an account or simply choose "Continue" to jump into the game. It's a little bit of a pain and it would be nice to disable this in the game's option.
Nonetheless, from there you hit the main menu for Armed Strike with options to Start a new campaign, Resume a campaign, Replay a mission, access the help screens, view your options (sound/music settings) view your achievements and access the online highscore.
The game screen for Armed Strike has your health and vitals running across the top of the screen. You begin each mission with three lives and your health is the colored bar running across the top of the screen. Your score and the pause button are in the upper right of the screen.
In the bottom left corner of the screen is the virtual joystick to guide your aircraft/boat, a small map showing your progress runs the bottom of the screen and a missile/special weapons button sits in the right corner. You do have a naval mission where you pilot torpedo boats but most of Armed Strike is air combat oriented.
Your first missions are from the air where you pilot various allied planes against German fighters and bombers. Your main guns fire automatically. To help with the main gun, along the way bonus weapons appear (little bubble icons) from the wreckage of destroyed enemy plane that can be fired from the red, weapons button. Bonus weapons have a time duration and a tiny countdown clock will appear next to your score to show how much time is left for that particular weapon. In addition to the weapons bonuses, balloons are scattered about that contain health points and ammunition. You'll need to shoot them up before you can collect these bonuses.
In a nutshell, you fight your way through the pesky smaller and mid-sized planes to get to the big boss of a plane. Once you take care of the boss, you'll see a mission summary and then move on to the next mission. The downside to the boss battles is that there isn't a damage meter for the bosses so you have no clue how far along your progressing in taking them out.
Armed Strike is a challenging game and graphics are nice. I'm not a big fan of the cloud cover scenes though. The clouds tend to hide enemy craft and the bonus bubbles at times. It adds to the challenge but can be a little on the frustrating side at times. Another nit is that with Armed Strike is that everything takes multiple hits to take out. From the smallest of enemy ships to the bonus balloons. It would be nice if the game threw you a break and offered a few easy targets from time to time.
Don't get me wrong, Armed Strike is a nice game for your Windows Phone. Graphics are nice, game play plenty challenging, controls simple and straight forward and with ten, re-playable missions there's plenty of game time. Many will find Armed Strike a welcomed addition to their Windows Phone gaming library.
There is a trial version available to let you try Armed Strike out before buying and the full version will run you $.99. You can find Armed Strike here in the Windows Phone Store.
