Striker Download (1985 Simulation Game)

A lone chopper armed with machine guns and bombs must navigate through five missions in order to rescue people and destroy and alien missile factory.

Striker is a side-scrolling shooter composed of five missions with different goals in each. The first mission will have you rescue your spies while the second will have to dropping off said spies. The third mission involves picking up cargo and the fourth stranded people. The final mission of the game is to attack the missile development factory and put an end to the alien threat.

During your missions you will be attacked by targets on land such as guns and missile silos and target that fly in a preset pattern. You have unlimited amount of weaponry but will have to pick up fuel in later levels in order to avoid crashing. Fuel is picked up simply by destroying fuel tank on the tunnel base.

This simple and fun game is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) DOS clones of the famous Scramble. Here, you control a chopper and have to fight off aliens through five missions. Your weaponry consists of cannons and bombs. Either can be used for any target, regardless of it being a ground or air target. What you will use depends on the situation: if it is in front of you, shoot it, if it is under you, bomb it. You have unlimited ammo so you may as well not release the fire buttons. The only thing that is not unlimited is fuel, so you have to destroy canisters on ramps, which replenishes a small amount of fuel.

Missions are basically the same: you fly above the landscape with various enemies and have to reach the end of the landscape. There you will have different tasks depending on the mission goal. Nothing much, but it is nice to add this as a change to constantly flying and shooting. You can choose from four levels of difficulty. They differ in the number and fire rate of enemies, number of points required for an extra life, and the first appearance of enemy types. If you select novice level, the first mission will have no flying targets. The first two types of flying enemies will be present in the second mission, and a new type will start appearing with each following mission. If you choose any harder level, the first few absences of certain enemy types are skipped. There are only a few different types, but to start off you may play novice or intermediate level to get familiar with the enemies. Naturally, when you beat all five missions, the game starts over, but keeps increasing the difficulty level. There is one more interesting feature that may be very useful sometimes: your bombs can destroy enemy bullets. This will probably influence your preference towards heights in Striker.

If you played Scramble, Sopwith or perhaps Defender than you are on familiar ground. If you liked these kind of games then Striker will surely entertain you for some time, and it can also be very challenging. A couple of short tunes on the PC speakers are present, and graphics could surely be better even for 1985. However, these sort of games don't really need to rely on visual appearance. If you can take the technical parts, this old game is surely fun for a short while.

Use the cursor keys to move your helicopter, SPACE for cannons, and X for bombs. You can always redefine the keys.

Striker is a fun freeware clone of Atari's Defender. As helicopter pilot, your mission is to navigate various tunnels in order to complete five missions of increasing difficulty. As you fly the helicopter through 2D side-scrolling landscape, you must deal with 5 different kinds of aliens, gun turrets, enemy missiles, and other obstacles. To handle these threats, you are given two weapons: bombs and bullets. As in Defender, you must constantly replenish your aircraft's fuel level by collecting fuel canisters that are scattered on the ground. In addition to fun gameplay, Striker allows you to choose from 4 difficulty levels and redefine every controlling key to suit your preference. You can also pause the game, toggle sound on and off, and play the game with a joystick. All in all, a very nice freeware game from the early days of PC gaming. Too bad the missions are over all too soon, and there is no random element to enhance the limited play value. But if you like Sopwith and similar games, you will have fun with this game while it lasts. Recommended!

How to run this game on modern Windows PC?

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