Major Stryker Reviews

If you're reading this review, you probably already know about the game. I bought it because I had the shareware version (with the first planet only) as a kid and I'm here to finish kicking Kreton behind.

man i loved this game as a kid still so good i use to think the guy on the loading screen looked old now he just looks like me.

spent hours upon hours playing the freeware version on my 486 back in my youth, good to see it runs just as it did 30 years later.

If you are a space shooter looking for a challenge, look no further. This game is well put together. My only complaints deal with the confusing EGA color palette. Sometimes the foreground and the background colors blend together and makes things confusing.

If you enjoyed Major Stryker 30 years ago, you may still enjoy it now. When you launch this, you can actually see it start up DosBox for emulation. There's nothing new, including native Windows support. It is exactly the same as all of the versions that have been available for the last 20 years.

Fun, feels like a predecessor to Raptor: Call of the Shadows, but with clunkier controls. BTW: This was made Freeware in 2006. Buy it if you want to compensate 3D Realms. Otherwise go download it and give it a try. :)

I played the shareware version of this back in an antedeluvian age and loved it. I'm not sure it's worth the $3 asking price but when it went on sale I snapped it up. It is old school. The difficulty is unforgiving, and there are no quality of life things that would come to be standard later. For instance you don't have 'health' or 'shields' exactly. The most hit points you can have are three, and you have to earn those by picking up upgraded firepower and items that are only dropped by mini-bosses at most three times per map. If you aren't 100% ON all the time, you will get wrecked. Weapon upgrades come pretty regularly, but if you get hit once you lose all of the ones you have accumulated, and if you are hit again when you have the basic weapon- you die. You die and you lose any additional bonuses that you have accrued during that life. The enemies are basic and predictable, but eventually you end up in this bullet hell mode where there is a lot going on at once on screen and the graphic design at some point actively impedes tracking- like enemy shots flashing and having almost exactly the same color pallette as some of the backgrounds. It's a wonderful game, though. A real throwback. It's real short, and it's great, it's unforgiving and repetitive.

0.4 hours on Steam, countless hours in the 90s when I was a kid on our old PC. The game's shareware (demo, for all you younger gamers) game in a collection of games that included the entirely of the first alien planet. I remember as a kid anxiously waiting for the full version to arrive in the mail after my dad ordered it on 2 floppy disks XD. Seeing it on Steam, I had to have it. This game is just as fun as I remember; running up your burst rating as high as possible to fill the screen with laser blasts, blowing the enemy away with Zap Bombs, chewing your way through every base, zone, and boss, and groaning at the absolute cheese of flirty pick-up lines the fleet admiral levels at you after every level. The game is a fantastic stroll down memory lane. If you want to play a good, solid retro shooter, this is more than worth the $3 it's priced at.

It's an MS-DOS classic. EGA Graphics, Adlib music, Soundblaster sound effects. All the classic look and sound of the era. Also relatively short, as is typical for games of the time. An episode can be finished in around an hour if you don't get killed too often. Apogee did the right thing by releasing it using DOSBox, though I can't say the same for the fact they took the approach of stretching the picture rather than presenting in its native aspect ratio. Fortunately, it's something that can easily be fixed with a simple edit of a config file. Still, if you like vertical-scrolling shooters, it's worth playing and isn't too hard. I played through episode 2 on Easy difficulty with keyboard-only input before writing this review and had 32 lives by the time I got to the end-of-episode boss (and lost three over the course of the fight).

[i]Note: - [url=https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/major-stryker/]This can be legally downloaded for free (or played in a web browser)[/url] thanks to it being made Freeware in 2006. If you buy this, it's for the enjoyment of officially having it in your Steam library or to support the dev. - You'll likely want to fix the aspect ratio by going into the Major Stryker folder and editing STRYKER.conf by setting "aspect=true" in the render section. It's passable in 16:9 but intended to be played in 4:3.[/i] Even for its time, Major Styker was a fairly back-to-basics shoot 'em up. There's not a lot of bells & whistles to its gameplay but it does the fundamentals well and backs them up with the pleasant, popping palette & visuals and solid soundtrack common to Apogee's particular flavour in the min-90s. The overall presentation carries a lot of weight in this title to the point that, almost 30 years later, I can hear the theme song in my head as soon as I see an image of the title screen. The best way I could describe the initial feel of the game is that it's got a punchy vibe for a shoot 'em up. The difficulty options allow this to be either a fairly chill experience on Beginner or a grueling challenge on Hard. It's a classic, but it's not perfect. The levels can sometimes drag on (likely made longer to ensure difficulty was maintained despite the game's between-level save feature). The first few bosses of each world are also slightly redundant to the point that anyone who got the (very generous @ 33% of the entire game) shareware demo back in the day pretty much got the full experience. Lastly, the controls can be a bit clunky with the speed power-up active to the point I almost always avoid it. The asking price on this is steep, especially considering it's Freeware to begin with. That said, I do recommend checking out the Freeware link above if only to see the game for a few minutes or considering grabbing it on sale if you're a fan of the title from when you were a kid.