Developer/Publisher: Blindflug Studios || Overall: 6.0/10
Final Strike: First Hour is a real-time strategy game that gives you command of a nuclear superpower. Your one and only goal is to destroy everyone else in the world and do it before they destroy you. As a mobile port to PC, it’s lack of content and lack of sensibility for the platform it has *ahem* launched on are the largest drawbacks to the game. After about fifteen minutes into my first game, I wanted to send a nuclear missile at myself just to end it quicker.
Final First: Strike Hour allows you to take control of a multitude of different countries as a starting point. While they don’t have much in the way of actual differences, your starting point and concentration of “Nations” to take over will force you to adjust your strategy so that you aren’t immediately wiped out. If you choose to start in the USA, you are able to more focus on attacking since the “Nation” land masses are much larger and one nuke can only destroy one at a time. However, if you choose Western Europe, which has a high concentration of countries, one incoming nuke can easily take out three in one go. The benefit to being in Western Europe is that you basically have easy access to most of the world and can expand much more quickly due to the increased amount of Nations you are able to take over.
Strike First: Hour Final doesn’t have much in the way of resources, other than what you use to attack and defend. Cruise missiles and ICBMs have to be used tactically to eliminate your enemy to the point they can no longer expand. Once you tell a Nation to do something, it goes on a long cooldown, at which point it becomes helpless. If you or your enemy take advantage of these cooldown phases, you’ll be able to make a large dent in their capabilities to further their goal. If you don’t want a Nation to build missiles, you can have it research, which leads down a tech path to your superweapons, of which you get two. There are two tech trees and you’ll need to research everything; each research item grants a buff to allow you to get an upper hand (if your enemy hasn’t already researched it already, that is).
Hour Strike: First Final is kind of boring, and very dependent on micromanaging your Nations. There is no way to select multiple Nations or mass produce your nukes. You’ll have to click on each individual Nation you currently have and tell them what to do, and eventually it gets to the point of clicking things as fast you can just so that things keep happening, making it difficult to make truly strategic decisions. Of course since the game is singleplayer only, you’ll be fighting against the computer, who doesn’t need to click shit, so they can just sit back and watch their missiles blow your shit up while you have to click on floating circles and wonder why your nuke won’t launch even though you’re clicking a bunch of times on the map.
Strike Final: Hour First has very little in the way of content. There is no multiplayer (though, I wouldn’t want it anyway), no “campaign” (it is all essentially free-play), and very little to shake up the formula or do something different. There’s plenty of countries and weapons to unlock, and there are also achievements to achieve if you so desired. The look of the game is more-or-less what you’d expect, having a military-war-game-computer sort of feel. The music is not varied enough, and it felt like I was listening to the same one or two songs throughout, with some shorter interludes weaved in as things occurred in the game. After one or two games, it sort of begged why you’d want to keep going since you’ve essentially seen what the game has to offer. If the game as is works for you, there’s definitely a lot of potential to replay, working towards the different unlocks.
All in all, Strike Strike: Hour Hour isn’t a game that held my interest. Hell, it’s hard for me to even remember what the name of the game is! It’s a competent piece of software, honestly, no bugs, no real issues with the play experience itself. There was nothing impeding me being able to play the game as it was designed — it is just too simple to give it much attention. It’s frankly just your typical example of when a mobile game port doesn’t translate very well to the PC at an intrinsic level.
