Review: Operation Night Strikers

Developer: Taito

Publisher: Clear River Games

Review code provided (eShop £18.99) 

More reviews

Quick update: Clear River had hoped to provide a gun peripheral (not to be confused with the G'AIM'E peripheral for Time Crisis) for use with the compilation but that has been cancelled due to cost/tariff issues. This has no impact on the review or really on the gameplay which is just as fun in its current form. 

Long gone are the days of throwing coin after coin into the arcade machines to inch forward in a life-or-death battle, especially when they were bastard-hard titles like Operation Wolf, where one missed cola bottle could spell doom. 

Operation Wolf was a leap forward in gaming, tilting the action from endless vertical shooters and going into the screen with the enemy appear from all sides and top and bottom. While the Uzi of the arcade cabinet has also gone, Clear River's revival effort still feels great. With gyro, normal controls or a USB mouse, get to the chopper and start blazing! 

Packing is a set of Taito classics, Operation Night Strikers includes Operation Wolf, Operation Thunder Bolt, which added some vehicle-based combat. The large sprites of Wolf still impress and the overall smoothness of so much shrapnel flying around the screen is great. With enemies popping out of buildings and from behind cover, its a millisecond battle to fight through each of six fun levels.

The Wolf games are a lot easier with endless credits a Z button away, or between different versions of the game, but the online high-scores only accept traditional play scores. Thunder Bolt's scrolling into the screen makes the visuals a little more blotchy, but it hardly matters as you stream bullets at them. 

Space Gun ups the ante with some into-the screen scrolling as aliens take over, each level a fierce mix of close-quarters battle and desperate scanning for health and ammo, goaded on by crisp digitised speech. Yes, this is a blatant Aliens rip-off, but its fast, fun and with an impressive array of alien environments, and a constant need to watch for innocents. 

Night Striker is a bit of an oddity in this collection as a Sega Space Harrier/ThunderBlade-esque shooter, but it provides a fun diversion if you get bored of on-foot slogging. There's some Death Star-style trench dodging. Very fast-paced, can you get through the half-hour of gameplay without resorting to a bunch of credits? (I couldn't)

Across these games, the Switch controls are a very good substitute for the arcade guns, unlike the House of the Dead revisit, giving a crisp sense of control amid the mayhem. The visuals are so crisp, in handheld or big screen mode. And overall, this is a delightfully short and fun nostalgia trip, all wrapped in a smart interface with a smattering of achievements, clear manual (although they never explain what the bikini girls are doing running through a warzone) and options to tweak the game in your favour or style. 

Do note a few console versions are listed as DLC, not sure if that's really fair given the superior nature of the arcade titles, but if you feel the need - dive in! 

Score 4/5