xbox live indie game reviews

I was expecting some sort of first-person shooter from the cover-art, but Strikeforce-Psi is actually a Contra-style run n' gun platformer. The character animations are decent, but for some reason none of the characters have arms (the kind with hands). In place of arms, they just have giant guns. While this looks okay on characters with assault rifles (who would theoretically be holding the gun with both hands), the main character looks silly with just a giant pistol attached to his chest. Besides your trusty giant pistol, you've also got grenades--which behave almost exactly the same as the pistol except for the fact that you can blow yourself up.

The grenades would be much more useful if you could lob them further, but as far as I can tell your bullets and grenades cease to exist as soon as they leave the screen (even if you're sure there's a guy just offscreen). This wouldn't be quite so bad if the camera weren't so terrible. Most of your time will be spent running forward, and the main character "drags" the camera along with him. When moving to the right, 2/3 of the screen will be behind you. That only leaves 1/3 of the screen available for all the game's "action" (remember that your bullets don't carry offscreen). Running back to the left is even worse--not only do you only get 1/3 of the screen to react to things, the giant HUD (though slightly transparent) takes up about half of the remaining space.

The backgrounds actually look pretty great, but they all have some pretty strange features. The first level, a desert, features a giant Saguaro cactus which makes the characters in the foreground seem like action figures. Even though the backgrounds vary from desert to arctic to jungle, both the main character and all of the enemies (well, there are only 2 enemy looks) dress the same.  Though there are two unique-looking AIs, both have only one behavior--patrol. If you time things right, you can just run through and shoot 5 or 6 guys in a row in the back. Collisions happen on your torso instead of your gun, which allows you to cozy up to walls and platforms to stick your gun through them. Exploiting this glitch, I was able to "snipe" a lot of the enemies in the game without them ever knowing I was there.

Combine the camera problems and the inane AIs with a pointless quest (what does gathering gold get you exactly?) and a lack of guns (just the one pistol?) and you're left with more Contra aspirations than Contra style gameplay. If you're a hard-core platformer fan who also loves military-themed games, this one might be okay at 200 points. That's a very narrow niche, though, and for the rest of us Strikeforce-Psi isn't worth the points.