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Strike Fighters: Modern Combat Remember the Strike Fighters series, you know the good old days, when most people were using Windows XP and Thirdwire had the Cold War era combat sim market to themselves. The days when free updates would fall from the cloud(s) giving us new game features for no extra cost. When we could marvel at flying iconic aircraft over historical battlefields such as Vietnam, Europe, the middle east, and some made up desert place……..all in the latest Direct X 9 Graphics. We thought those days would last forever, but sadly after a while Thirdwire realised it could no longer afford anything greater than a Mcdonalds double Cheeseburger for its lunch. It then released an ambitious new addition set over the North Atlantic, however sadly the games didn’t fly off the virtual shelves and they realised they couldn’t even afford an out of date cheeseburger from the Iceland budget supermarket chain. Then just as all hope was lost, out of nowhere, lady luck smiled on the starving company and smart phones and tablets rained down from the heavens. Not only were these mini PCs locked down for any old idiot to use, they came with interesting new opportunities to make money. And here we are in good old 2017 with the release of Strike Fighters: Modern Combat. Anyone who has played any of the Strike Fighters mobile series (e.g. Strike Fighters: Attack) will instantly recognise the type of game this is, however there are some changes, and the development of this series has now advanced a bit further on compared to the original Strike Fighters or Strike Fighters: Israel on IOS or Android. Windows 10 This is the first of the series you can buy for a Windows device from the Thirdwire store, so if you are one of the ten people that have a Windows mobile device (including myself yaah!) this might be good news. I however am not going to buy that version and instead am going to review the version on IOS ( iPhone ). Features The controls are pretty much the same as before, tilt the phone to bank, pitch and roll, there is a rudder option in the menu if you must. Because of the large variety of weapons there is a handy mode select (MSL SEL) button to switch ordnance, you always have guns available though(if you have any). Once a weapon is selected it will auto lock onto a relevant target, for example a Radar if you have selected an Anti- Radiation missile, or an aircraft if you have selected an ASRAAM. The veteran F-4 still makes an appearance There is a handy 360 degree radar type screen you get in the top right corner. Advanced jets like the FA-18C will have a Data Link type picture showing all ground and air targets and if they are friend or foe. Less advanced jets like the Su-22M4 only show an older radar type picture with green blobs. (Note the blob with diamond is your primary target set) An auto lock on a ground target brings up a nifty Infra Red (IR) view as you might see from a targeting pod, and you can press Mode to get the 360 degree radar view back at any time. (Not that I can make anything out on a tiny iPhone screen anyway!) When out of view, red arrows will point to the enemy jets and blue arrows to friendlies (just like 1980s computer games!). Green thing acquired sir Missions & Mission Editor The game auto chooses a mission for you (Escort/ Intercept / Fighter sweep / etc) which you then attempt to complete by blowing up as many relevant targets as you can in the given time period. If you destroy all the mission targets your mission ends even earlier.(you can even abort by pressing pause then hitting the cross) On each mission you often have allied jets helping you by blasting those baddies out of the sky! If you want to pay you can unlock the mission editor feature getting options to customise the missions a bit more. Weapons Loadout You can now select weapons (again a paid unlock), and just like in life the more money you have the more you make (perhaps). For example with the F-16 I can remove the tanks and add 4 x GBU-12s to go with 8 x SDBs and 4 x AIMs which is a potential 1600 points yippee! The flying SAM site! Points mean prizes Literally the more points you get the more credit you get. On a typical mission you might get 500 to 1000 points with the right aircraft, choose an A-10C or F-5E for the A-A role though and you had better be good with the gun to rack up the points. More points please – plus purists avert your eyes! Flight models Hmmm……….nothing to see here, I think it might have borrowed the one from the 1980s arcade game Afterburner. The music Yes, you can still switch that off by putting the phone to silent. Payware Well yes, the game is free and you can play it for free, however the aircraft you may want are very expensive and so getting enough credits may take a while. Su-57 = lots of roubles You can of course remove the adds by always playing off line, which is a good way to save battery and not constantly microwave your hands, however there is an incentive to play online because you get 500 free points per day for logging in every day. So for example 10 consecutive days will yield 10 x 500 points! That’s not all folks, after one mission a birthday cake appeared on the left top corner to which I clicked on. Here I was given the option to watch a 30 second hotel advert for 10,000 extra free credits (which I took). If you click on the trolley with a dollar sign you will find options to buy 375,000 credits per payment and other features to pay for including the mission editor and loadout screen as mentioned. 375000 credits doesn’t go far in Strike Fighters land! Summary Strike Fighters: Modern Combat brings together good features from the earlier mobile games and adds to them. If you want to pay to unlock the features you will likely get more from it, however it seems to be a fairly fun arcade game, especially when you need to baby sit your daughter or are at lunchtime at work, or instead of work maybe. As for the future, perhaps utilisation of Virtual Reality could be one direction…who knows. Off to kick some A-A butt! Anyone not familiar with the original mobile games might be interested to read this previous review: