Strikers 1945 Plus App Review

Back when I was still writing about iPhone shoot-em-ups, I was driven by a desire to see more ports of classic arcade titles reach the platform in some way. A year later, Strikers 1945 Plus is the first one to actually fit the description. Unfortunately, it's too little, too late: The past 12 months of App Store games included more than a few arcade-style scrolling shooters worth playing -- pleasantly original ones, to boot. So I found it a bit disappointing that Strikers comes off as a a lazy port that doesn't look or feel much like its source material, and falls into the same traps as all the other low-tier iPhone shooters.

The first of those traps being the resolution. Strikers 1945 Plus started life as a NeoGeo port of the original Strikers 1945 by developer Psikyo, but was always a low-res 16-bit game regardless. Rather than scale up the sprites and the rest of the graphics, they're kept as-is, so you get yet another iPhone shooter with tiny objects on a spacious playfield -- not exactly how the original game was designed.

Next is the control: A virtual D-pad and buttons, and no alternative. I usually abide by the "touch anywhere" method of controlling your ship, but I do respect a responsive virtual D-pad as well. But 1945 Plus has a fat, rectangular (?!) D-pad in the corner of the screen, which has relatively small diagonals, leading to recognition problems. Compound this with the game's vertical presentation -- it's bad enough typing on an iPhone vertically, but having to thumb around on a fake D-pad in a hectic shooter is even worse. Consider the fact that the original 1945 Plus was meant for a horizontal screen, like all other NeoGeo games, and this port just keeps failing to make sense. Other maddening flaws are the slightly choppy framerate and the literal butchering of the music: Short clips of the original tracks that loop too soon and become extra grating.

Now, 1945 Plus was never a great shooter, which wasn't helped when Psikyo later produced more enjoyable (or at least less ugly) games like Gunbird 1 and 2. But it was straightforward, challenging, and worthy of several minutes' play. I think it deserved better than this.

The Verdict

Does Strikers 1945 Plus add some color to the still-somewhat-bleak iPhone shoot-em-up landscape? No, and that's awfully disappointing considering how far we've come already. You'll have to stick with now-standard shooters like Space Invaders Infinity Gene, Siberian Strike, or your other faves for a while longer.

Is it worth $4.99? Even if you consider it a dollar per minute, you probably still won't bother with it that long. It might be a better deal on paper when you compare it to the also-downloadable $12 PSP version, but that port is actually much more accurate... and you get a real D-pad.

[iTunes: $4.99]