MetalStrike, by Greatel Software, $14.66
Reviewed August 2002

The first time I saw the robot fighters in MetalStrike, I thought I’d seen the Crazy Skate from the new ToeJam & Earl III game on the Xbox. Once I loaded the game and played a few levels, I realized this game reminded me of Metal Slug. I was a long time Metal Slug addict, so I took immediate liking to MetalStrike, which has more flexibility in game play than Metal Slug. In this game, you get to control one of two futuristic robots roaming through country roads, city streets, and railways and shooting anything in your way. When I say anything, I mean everything: the farmhouses, trees, armed trucks, tanks and ammo boxes, and even the cows. When you shoot down the trees or burn down a house, you might just pick up more power, more shield or rockets.

Picture a farmland where trees and grass grow and cows munch grain in the backyard. Or how about a nice town square surrounded by shopping malls and regulated by traffic lights? Now put Kung Fu fighters with guns somersaulting at you non-stop, truck gunners and tanks at every road or street corner shooting big missiles at you, and large mean robot-tanks that treat you to a thumb-numbing shooting spree at each end of a level. This is MetalStrike!

The game plays in 2D top view, and has three different settings: countryside, barracks and city. The graphics are outright cartoonish with saturated colors, which make the environment both fun and funny. Who’d seen cows running around in city streets and large mech-robots coming out of mountains? But in this game, anything that looks out of place adds to the humor and the style. The game engine, which can support over 200 moving objects at the same time, gives you a vivid intensive fighting experience.

The controls in MetalStrike combine hardware buttons for shooting and stylus for moving the robots. The stylus control is very smooth and you can move while shooting. The music and sound effects are excellent in MetalStrike. They not only fit the theme, but also add the atmosphere to the action. You get the feeling that these tracks are not randomly added, but through a very thoughtful process.

As much as I love this game and will continue to play it, there are a few problems. One is that the game takes about 10MB space, which means you’ll probably need to use a storage card. I don’t mind this trade off for great graphics and sound FX. Another problem is occasional crashing. I worked with the developer for two weeks before the game’s official release to try and remedy this (they're working on it ). The game crashed on the iPAQ 3800 series and the Toshiba e310 a couple of times. The game developer in China does not have access to a great number of Pocket PCs, though the game will work perfectly on Jornada 568.

Playing Hints and Tips

Shoot houses, towers and ammo boxes: you will get goodies in return. You do need to shoot the trees, cows and other things that are in your way so you can get through.

The bosses are not that hard to beat, as long as you concentrate your firepower to one piece at the time.