The Xbox One’s first indie game is finally here and it’s a the definitive edition of a year old PC game…which is also coming out on the PS4. Baby steps and all that. Strike Suit Zero is a throwback to the old space combat games like Rogue Squadron, with a little Zone of the Enders thrown in there for good mix…OK a lot of Zone of the Enders. I have to confess that I’ve never played either of those games, so I come into the space fighter combat/mech hybrid genre as a bit of a n00b. Thankfully, Strike Suit Zero was nothing if not thorough in its tutorials, so newcomers will find themselves eased gently into the experience.

The gameplay is simple enough to get to grips with. You fly around in your fighter craft shooting down other ships and when you feel like being a badass, you engage the Strike Suit mode, turn into a Gundam-style mech and blow everything in the vicinity into space dust. Without the Strike Suit, the game would feel like a one trick pony as the space combat can get very samey, very quickly. With the Strike Suit, it elevates itself the dizzy heights of a two-trick pony.

The Strike Suit has several guns, but the only one you’ll ever find yourself using is the multi-lock missile system, which can devastate entire swarms of enemy fighters or strip the guns from a frigate in seconds. You may be asking, why would you ever not be in Strike Suit mode if it’s such a beast? Well because you can only use it when you have enough energy, which you must recharge by shooting down ships in fighter mode, that’s why.

What I’m getting at here is that the game is very repetitive and after the first few missions, you won’t find much new content to keep things fresh. One mission later on unlocks a bomber equipped with torpedoes which lets you fly around shredding capital ships, but for the most part you’re just blowing fighters out of the sky and occasionally ripping the guns off a larger ship to help your own fleet in the fight.

It’s the later of those two that will be your bread and butter, not only because the larger ships are more dangerous, but also because it’s way more fun to play David vs Goliath, nimbly evading flak fire as your pick away at a capital ship. In addition to the gun turrets which can be stripped off, you can also hit enemy ships in their weak points for massive damage, allowing you to bring them down with ease. Thankfully Strike Suit Zero recognises that this is its strong suit, and most missions will centre around taking down the larger threats.

Despite its somewhat repetitive nature, Strike Suit Zero is very entertaining; the legacy of several generations of kids brought up on Star Wars and its epic space-based dogfights mean that it’s as close to a primeval high as a sci-fi game can give you. There is something so very natural about getting into the cockpit of a fighter and blowing some other poor fool to smithereens.

There is very little challenge to be found here though, with enemy fighters and ships being woefully ineffective at shooting you down unless you just sit still. Missiles are your only real threat as they can lock on to you, but even they can be swatted away with a well-timed EMP blast, the space age equivalent of a pimp slap. Difficulty is often added to missions by forcing you to protect friendly ships, forcing you to take out the enemy’s big guns quickly if you want your ships to survive the encounter. It’s a good way to crank up the tension whilst still allowing you to feel like a god in the cockpit.

Combat and flight speeds are quite a bit slower than you might expect, especially when you can hold down the brake to slow yourself to a crawl. This makes it a damn site easier to aim, but it really pulls you out of that dogfight feeling that the game tries to create.

The plot is just pants…not quite soiled pants, just really boring, tighty whitey pants. Amnesia as a protagonist motivation really should be banned but whatever. Your character wakes up on an outer rim planet with no memory of how he got there. Taking the next logical course of action, he enrols in the navy/air force/whatever you call it when it’s in space and gets embroiled in a war between earth and the colonies. There is obviously some larger threat in play involving our forgetful friend, a suspicious AI and a giant alien space ship but it’s all so forgettable.

The characters are all one-dimensional stereotypes, such as the cocky fighter pilot chick who is always in trouble with ‘the man’ and might as well have ‘I’m Starbuck from the Battlestar Galactica reboot’ tattooed on her face. Add in the ‘over the edge commander out for revenge’, the AI who is obviously up to something and the insanely evil for very little reason bad guys, and you have yourself the most generic line-up of chaps and gals in gaming history. Also the voice acting ranges from meh to atrocious, especially the chick who is projecting Starbuck, who announces an incoming distress call with a level of disinterest usually reserved for reading aloud the instructions on a microwave dinner.

For the Director’s Cut of Strike Suit Zero, the graphics were given a shot of botox and whilst mutton dressed as lamb is pushing it a bit too far, Strike Suit Zero is hardly a looker. The background vistas of nebulae and planets are stunningly beautiful, but anything closer the a few thousand kilometres away starts show its age.

Also included in the Director’s Cut is the DLC Campaign Heroes of the Fleet, which allows you to recreate historic missions in a training simulator. The missions themselves aren’t too bad and show a little more variation than the main campaign. Heroes of the Fleet comes in at 5 missions, just under half that of the main campaign, so you’re certainly getting the quantity.

In addition to this, you also get access to a couple of Strike Suit variations, one suited to extreme close ranges and another suited to, you guessed it, extreme long ranges. These suits are interesting, but they both suffer from being worse than the normal suit in most situations.

Strike Suit Zero: Directors Cut is a solid addition to the space fighter combat genre, but it adds very little to what has already come before. Turning into a Gundam to obliterate everything around you is a nice party piece, but it’s not enough to keep the game feeling fresh throughout. If you’re a fan of the genre then you’ll enjoy it, but don’t expect anything ground-breaking and certainly don’t come here looking for an engaging story or interesting characters.