Strikers 1945 is a shoot-em-up classic from the arcades. It’s the shoot-em-up that got me sucked into the genre and led me down a rabbit-hole of brutally hard arcade games. Think Dark Souls, or I Wanna Be The Guy, but now put a quarter in a jar every time you died. Yeah, old-school shmup players know brutal gameplay with a real price.
I had played other games of the genre before, most notably the original 1942 on the Nintendo Entertainment System, but it wasn’t until Strikers 1945 that I got hooked, and for very good reason. The Strikers series took the original concept of an airplane fighting in WWII and flipped it on its head.
This is now an alternate timeline, and while the fight is still the same, the tools are very different. It’s like the future past and the sort of video game that only Japan could dream up. You still play as a propeller-based aircraft, only in this timeline the power output of everything has been cranked to eleven.
Enemies feature the standard WWII-themed aircraft with some neat tweaks. Sure, these crafts never existed but they are similar enough, or share a structural base to make you think they could have flown. But it isn’t long before you’ll be up against aircraft that look futuristic even in 2020. Bombers and fighters come hot and heavy, all of which lead to each stages boss.
The cool thing is that all the bosses in Strikers 1945 have multiple parts. You might start up against a standard battleship which then rolls out huge laser canons as you destroy the upper deck. Take out the lasers and you’ll be treated to a Gundam-like mech that comes out to challenge your dominance of the skies.
I love the idea of taking something like the world of Gundam and sticking it right smack-dab in the middle of WWII. And everything simply looks stunning running in HD. In fact, you have three options for the game’s visuals. You can select an HD pixel mode that looks amazingly sharp and looks better than the game ever looked back int he day.
Another mode adds a slight blur to everything that makes it feel more arcade accurate with hose older and slightly fading CRT monitors that you looed at through knicked and fogged up plexiglass. Finally, there is a scanline mode that always looks like junk in any game that uses it, trying to capture the at-home look and feel of the PS1 edition.
Of course, if you are playing on modern monitor chances are you can probably take advantage of the Tate Mode built into Strikers 1945. This flips the screen and lets you play in portrait mode just as intended. Luckily enough, the monitor in my office allows me to easily flip it. Pretty sure it was intended to use in something like Excel or to keep a Twitch chat up on, but this is more my style. Or, you could play it this way on your landscape monitor making it more in line with horizontal shooters.
Gameplay is as straightforward as it comes. You press the fire button to attack and move to avoid enemy fire as a single stray bullet will ruin your day. And in another slick move can tap a dedicated button to fire as well as simply holding down a button to auto-fire. Using an arcade joystick meant I wanted an authentic experience, so tapping to shoot is the only way to go. And of course you have your special attack that can help clear the screen.
Strikers 1945 presents you with a number of actual aircraft alongside one crazy one. You can play as the Japanese Zero or the American P51 Mustang and everything in-between. But don’t think that each of these planes play the same, even if a few share a similar look. Some are faster than others and feature slightly different hitboxes, but the real distinction comes from the game’s powerups.
Destroy certain planes or buildings and you’ll be able to pick up a floating power-up that expands your planes capabilities. You might start with a pea-shooter but you’ll quickly be adding support craft that fire digital death on everything on screen. Some craft are more direct and tunnel-like, while other feature a bigger spread, and others with seeking missiles. This gives each craft their own playstyle.
There’s a craft for the direct shooter in you, a craft for those that enjoy ducking and dodging, one for newcomers that need a little extra automatic help and so on. This adds a lot of replayability to the game as I play through it very different in the Shinden (fast and nimble) as opposed to the P-38 Lightning (slow and powerful). Part of the fun of Strikers 1945 is that each craft is a lot of fun to learn to see which you enjoy using the most.
The difficulty is perfect, or at least I think so. While you can adjust it on a level from 1 to 10, I think the normal difficulty is the perfect sweet-spot. Yes, you are going to get you ass kicked as bullets begin flying across the screen, but this is the best place to learn the game. Strikers 1945 is all about pattern recognition. At first you will feel lost but in time you’ll begin to learn what certain enemies do, how they shoot, and the best pattern to avoid their fire.
The pacing is just right for this on normal. It’s easy opening up and teaching you naturally what to do, Learning to avoid enemy fire is part of the fun and you’ll find yourself dying a fair bit, especially in the later stages, but you’ll also start connecting the dots with patterns and bosses. Each death happened a little farther up than the last, giving me the sense of progression, something not so available in the genre today.
Add a friend into the mix and Strikers 1945 becomes quite a bit of chaotic fun. On top of that, you have access to score attacks modes and online leaderboards that are perfect to do a little bragging with. The shoot-em-up genre isn’t quite as accessible as it used to be. I love it, even to this day, but right around the time Ikaruga hit the scene I could see it becoming for the younger generation that didn’t grow up in the arcades.
It’s for this reason that Strikers 1945 hits all the right marks in my book. It’s a shoot-em-up that feels just a bit more casual when compared to other games in the genre in modern times. It also takes things back to basics and places the focus on your skill shooting and moving instead of fancy mechanics and abilities. Even better is that you can actually play the game as Strikers 1945 didn’t see a lot of home ports, or at least very good ones (the Saturn one was damn good though).
Strikers 1945 is a fantastic port to the PC that brings one of the best shooters of the ’90s into the modern age. But it’s not perfect as it lacks a training/practice mode that I remember from the console release. The ten levels of difficulty really help cater the game to any player coming at it. Add in the fact that it’s priced right at $9.99 and you have a publisher that cares about the product and the consumer before and not just trying to earn a quick buck like it seems with so many classic ports to Steam.
“Strikers 1945 is a classic shmup with a unique setting and art-style that is as fun today as it was when it released into the arcades back in 1995”
Final Score: 4/5
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