Developed by The Edge/Foley Hi-Tech and published by Electronic Arts in 1994.

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Rounding out the original 16-bit trilogy of Strike games, Urban Strike was released in 1994 on both Mega Drive and SNES consoles.

The game picks up some time after the conclusion of Jungle Strike with a wealthy business and public relations mogul, H.R. Malone, using his popularity as a smokescreen to secretly construct a power laser-based super weapon with which to wreak havoc on America. It turns out that Malone is actually Carlos Ortega, the drugs baron that you thought you had killed during the Jungle campaign, yet he managed to survive and has undergone extensive re-constructive surgery. It's your mission to eradicate Malone's forces, discover the location of his super-laser and destroy it once and for all.

The game is instantly familiar to anyone who played either of the previous games in the series. The game consists of a number of missions, each divided into a number of sub-missions that typically involve blowing things up, or transporting people to safety. This time, you're piloting an entirely fictional attack chopper called the Mohican, although it carries the exact same ordnance and has the same control scheme as before.

In fact, Urban Strike does little to add anything new to the mix. The expanded vehicle roster from Jungle Strike has been reduced to infrequent use of a rather chubby and unwieldy Blackhawk transport chopper and a single mission in an armoured ground vehicle.

In fact, the main addition to the game is the inclusion of a new on-foot mission system, but these sections aren't much fun at all. Your badly drawn pilot must navigate a series of badly drawn interiors, shooting cardboard cut-out enemies and stationary gun turrets whilst completing some uninteresting sub-missions and nothing to the game.

The flight sections are, of course, the real meat and potatoes of the game, but even these feel tired and poorly conceived when compared to Jungle Strike. The previous games felt like the missions you were flying had some importance and also formed part of an overall narrative, whereas the missions in Urban Strike feel somewhat contrived. Despite an initially decent opening mission, the rest of the game feels very much as though the designer's hearts really weren't in it when making this.

The final mission in particular looks as though very little time was actually spent on it. It seems to be set in what looks like a massive (flat) grass field with a random smattering of vehicles and the appearance of giant boards where someone is playing noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe)! The whole thing feels like an unfinished bonus level instead of the grand showdown that it should be.

Continuing the trend of things that seem to be worse things time around, the graphics seem to have taken a nose-dive in quality. The sprites and background are all quite grainy and don't seem to be as fluidly animated as before. This is noticeable when comparing the Mohican and Jungle Strike Comanche sprites to one another, with the Comanche featuring more frames of animation in the movement of it's rotor blades, creating a much smoother effect. Compare the two games side-by-side and it's Jungle Strike that looks the better of the two games.

What's more surprising is Urban Strike suffers from some particularly noticeable slow-down when the screen gets busy with multiple enemies and gunfire. Whereas Jungle Strike maintained silky smooth scrolling throughout, Urban Strike's frame-rate is all over the place, making controlling the chopper tricky at times.

Don't get me wrong, there is fun to be had (after all, the flight model and combat are as good as they always were), but there's a constant, nagging feeling that Urban Strike could and should have been better than this.
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