Aug 5
Review: 1942: Joint Strike (XBLA)
1942: Joint Strike is a wonderful reiteration of the revolutionary top-down shoot ‘em up that originally graced the NES so many years ago. However, this time, instead of featuring mandated screen-flicker, Joint Strike delivers a monotone array of greys and browns and blues that define the war game atmosphere. Coupled with a vast enemy system with decent AI, the result is a dreary, sometimes confusing pandemonium that lasts until the final shot is fired.
Can 1942: Joint Strike stand up to the success of it’s predecessor? Hit the jump to find out!
As it sits right now on my Xbox 360 hard drive, Joint Strike is nothing more than above average. The stakes for Xbox Live Arcade game developers are constantly being raised, what with such great games as Geometry Wars Evolved 2, Braid, Bionic Commando: Rearmed and Castle Crashers either already released or on the immediate horizon, and developers need to step up the game with fresh ideas instead of constantly reusing recycled concepts. Joint Strike, unfortunately, harbors more of the latter.
While the added online mode and the addition of “joint strikes” in multiplayer are welcome additions, they really don’t do much to the existing game. It is still the most basic of shoot ‘em ups, featuring stock power-ups, the necessary bombs and frequent and predictable end-of-level bosses. The game is almost exactly as it was 28 years ago, which for some may be a good thing. 1942: Joint Strike will be regarded as a very good game by fans of the original game, as well as fans of SHMUPS, but for us XBLA lay people who are not entirely infatuated with shoot ‘em ups, I would deem Joint Strike to be merely passable.
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I didn’t realize this had come out already. Must have happened during the two weeks I was away from the Internet.