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. Read the STRIKER.DOC for more instructions.
You will need to have your Dosbox cycles set low for this game to run at a playable speed. Somewhere below 1000 should work fine.
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