Call of Duty Strike Team

Call of Duty: Strike Team for iOS is a slave to its own name. At its best, it brings fresh ideas to the series, including squad combat and a top-down perspective that’s well suited for touch devices. But, alas, Activision wasn’t content to make a Call of Duty game without some first-person shooting, even though that part of Strike Team is its weakest aspect. As always, shooting feels slow and imprecise on a touchscreen. Instead of being wholly designed around the device it’s played on, Strike Team is a middling, wishy-washy game with a crippling identity problem.

If you start tossing out random words and phrases from a Tom Clancy novel, you’ve got a pretty good chance of accidentally spoiling Strike Team’s plot. Normally there are terrorists, operatives, and arms dealers. It’s a typical, contemporary war story, but without the excitement of seeing a nuclear explosion or getting shot between the eyes in the first five minutes.

The gameplay hook is that, at any time, you can switch from a first-person view to an overhead drone’s perspective. From the sky, you can direct your squad to cover, Call of Duty: Strike Team delivers a first-person and third-person Call of Duty experience built from the ground up for mobile and tablet devices.

From the sky, you can direct your squad to cover, order them to fire, toss grenades, secure objectives, and more. This mode enhances the tactics of positioning and map awareness while negating the need for sharp, precise aiming. Because you’re almost always controlling multiple soldiers, it’s often possible to boost over fences, set up your own covering fire, or distract enemies for silent takedowns. Playing Strike Team this way is fun, challenging, and brimming with tactical options.

Unfortunately, the aerial mode has its share of problems too, mostly in the areas of AI and fine-level control. Soldiers sometimes misuse cover, refusing to duck, for example, when an automatic turret is turning them into Swiss cheese. You can’t tell units to crouch unless you’re controlling them specifically, so you’ll have to switch back to first-person mode, swap into the soldier you want to control, and then crouch, then swap back – which is tedious and sloppy. There are also times when it looks like your man is in position to take out an enemy, though when you double tap the foe nothing happens. Is the enemy out of range? Is there some obstacle blocking your firing path? Strike Team doesn’t tell you, so you’re forced to retreat back into first-person mode again and again to line up your shots the old-fashioned way.

There’s plenty of it, at least, with plentiful bite-sized missions that are well designed for mobile play. Most have one straightforward objective, so you won’t forget what you were doing if you need to put your phone away for a few minutes. Leveling up is a quick and frequent process. You’re constantly unlocking new perks, weapons, and currency for the surprisingly fair in-game store and the speed at which your arsenal expands is one of the best reasons to keep playing. Those unlocks can also be used in the wave-based survival challenges, though that mode isn’t immune to the bigger control issues.