Halo: Spartan Strike

Warning: As of the writing of this review, I've only beaten about half of the campaign. This review may or may not be indicative of the full experience of this game! So, let's get started. It's an alright top-down shooter, probably one of the few you'll find on the market that actually offer up vehicular combat as well, however you won't be able to whip the game to your whims, meaning none of that classic vehicle cheesing we all know and love. I do have gripes of course, and some may be just directly related to me just neglecting to put in the effort to tweak the game in my compat settings on Linux. These gripes will be marked with an asterisk (*) if I believe flawed compat could be a reason. -* Controls, Game appears to only function via gamepad. I've been unable to get mouse & keyboard to be detected by this game. Granted, I much prefer playing with a gamepad, so its not much of a loss, but it needs to be addressed -* Gunplay, Fire rate can sometimes be wildly inconsistent, I've experienced a few deaths related to the magnum taking beyond 1s between shots - Stars, Your star in each level is determined by your score. In various levels, I've struggled to just barely gain enough points to get gold by default, makes me think it forces me to use the score booster, which is rather concerning. It wouldn't be as much of a gripe, likely even not mentioned here, if it weren't for the fact that I am aware that I need golds in EVERY level prior to Operation E to unlock it. - Armory, When playing levels, you can to spend credits you gain from "Assault Ops" for various perks or more powerful weapons, however you're forced to spend them wisely, because those investments don't carry around through the operation, and may not even persist in each individual mission, I'd need to go through a replay to be certain. Additionally, I would much rather have more control over what weapons I could use, because power weapons are often not really the best choice when you just need a decent batch of rifles to beat any mission. - GUI, Speaking of which, the GUI makes it hell to even achieve these tasks. I've found myself having to reference screenshots just to know how many points I need to reach gold and know what I need to do to complete ops. There's no level menu elements that I can pull up to know if I reached my goal or not. - Gameplay, Bioscan platforms are probably the WORST way to integrate "stand your ground" sections, all just because you get turned into a sitting pinata. It's a shooter, you're supposed to dodge the bullets! - Levels, How missions are set up tend to wreck the flow of each operation. The length of an operation is about as much as a regular mission from the mainline games, but each mission slices up the operations WAY too thin, and making preserving key items you pick up to be too much hassle, and this is part of why I find the scoring system is also rather questionable. Overall: Go into this treating it like a low-budget mobile game, because it most likely was retooled from that short stint with Win8, you know, the OS MS tried to design like it was for smartphones. Its also something where I can only really recommend buying it if its really cheap, even $3 is rather pricy for what you get here.