Strike Team Hydra review - Turn-based strategy gone horribly wrong
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| Strike Team Hydra

With mobile games, it's often the case that offering simplicity over needlessly complex experiences makes for a far better game.

This is something that Strike Team Hydra could stand to learn, with its incredibly large amount of pointless information, and an obtuse tutorial that doesn't teach you anything useful.

Throw in some uninspired, repetitive gameplay, poor controls, and a litany of other, smaller issues, and you get a game that just isn't much fun to play.

Going in

Strike Team Hydra throws you almost immediately into the deep end, asking you to put together your team of soldiers without really explaining what you're doing or what makes them effective.

There is some kind of story here, but to read it you'll need to wait for the text to slowly appear on screen, with no option to move faster without skipping the dialogue altogether.

Strike Team Hydra

Only after you've picked your squad do you get to access a tutorial, and here you'll spend about five minutes being told what every menu item is for before you finally get to move your first soldier.

First impressions are everything, and within ten minutes of starting the game, you might begin to wonder why exactly you bothered.

Something's not right

Actual gameplay is similar to XCOM, in that you have a squad of soldiers who can move around or attack enemies, and you take it in turns to put them in position and deal out damage.

You can only move as far as your AP allows, which also means that you can't move and shoot in the same turn if you go too far, adding further frustration to proceedings.

But by far the worst thing is the awful UI, which crowds the screen with more buttons and options than you can shake a stick at.

Strike Team Hydra

There's also some issues with button sizes – the "next unit" button is tiny compared to the "abilities" button that it's placed just above, so if you're not careful, you'll be opening a menu every five seconds instead of moving characters around.

You can't undo actions either, so when you inevitably mess up and send a unit to the wrong location while trying to move the camera around, you're stuck there until the next turn.

It is honestly, truly difficult to find anything positive to say about Strike Team Hydra. It's functional in its own way, and if you can fight through the weird menus, you get to play an OK version of XCOM.

Abort mission

But the question you have to ask yourself is, why bother? Why not just go and play a superior version of a game that is readily available on the App Store?

Strike Team Hydra offers absolutely nothing new to the strategy genre, and manages to make everything worse with a crowded UI, confusing menus, and way too much information.

If you can look past all that you'll just find a game you've already played done poorly, and you'll kick yourself for wasting your time.

Strike Team Hydra review - Turn-based strategy gone horribly wrong

Needlessly complex and ultimately rather dull, Strike Team Hydra is not worth your time at all
Score
Ric Cowley
Ric Cowley
Ric was somehow the Editor of Pocket Gamer, having started out as an intern in 2015. He hopes to take over the world the same way.