Game Review: Blackhawk Striker 2

Blackhawk Striker 2 is a top-down shoot em up game. If you've ever played Galaga, you know how it feels. The controls are simple: use either WASD or the arrow keys to move around and press spacebar to fire all weapons. You get to fight dozens of different enemies and the levels get harder as you go along. It's only for PC, though it would be REALLY cool if it could be ported to the Zune HD or Xbox 360.

Blackhawk Striker 2 runs off the WildTangent driver. Which isn't bad, but I know for a fact that WildTangent likes to suck your money away. I'll talk about that later.

The first thing you'll notice about Blackhawk Striker 2 is the visuals. It's a very graphic-heavy game with impressive 3d and particles effects. One of the most impressive parts of the game is that it's not slow at all. I can play it properly on medium graphical settings on my netbook. Which is quite a feat, because the details are superb and there's a lot of depth perception going on.


The game is heavy on visuals.

When it comes to gameplay, it's actually quite hard. I've had to play the very first level dozens of times to get used to how the game works. After a few seconds of gameplay, you'll notice there's A LOT of stuff flying around on the screen. Helicopters, gunships, airplanes, boats, and tanks are all shooting something or another at you. You do, however, get a lot of powerups. As you fly around your chopper, you can pick up weapon, rotor, bomb, or missile upgrades as you play. Weapon upgrades let you have a better primary weapon, which is the standard glowing bullet you shoot. Rotor upgrades your flying speed, which decreases with each weapon upgrade, so it's always good to have an even rotor-weapon upgrade level. Missiles can shoot other things in the air, and bombs can destroy stuff in the water. There's more powerups, including wingmen and telsa, but I won't look into that for this review.




There's a lot of stuff on the ground you can blow up with your bombs.


The visuals in the game are pretty amazing. And this isn't even the highest quality setting.


Oh no! I died!

Now, Blackhawk Striker 2 costs $20 - which is quite a lot for a top-down shooter. This is what's annoying about WildTangent, because their games are always pretty expensive. They, however, include a rental plan, in which you can buy "game tokens" to play games for an hour a piece. I had bought the game separate.

In conclusion, Blackhawk Striker 2 is a great game for any top-down shooter fan. With stunning visuals and great gameplay, you can't really go wrong with this game. Although it's quite expensive, if you have twenty dollars one day I would highly recommend you buy it.

That's all for now!