TLDR: I recommend this game because it is an old school strategy game with fun mechanics, but suffers from a bad interface and lack of multiplayer. Not recommended for people that don't like hectic and long games against AI opponents.

I own Direct Hit Missile War since 2011 from another distribution platform and asked the dev for a key so I could write a review to give future buyers an impression of the game. This should explain my low play time before writing this lengthy review.

The game is an older real time strategy game about constructing missiles from components to shoot at an enemy base that you need to scout first and then hit structures of strategic value, all the while improving your economy of resource extraction, component production. There is no direct engagement between bases via ground-, air or seatroops, all is done via missiles. It is rather complex, fast paced and fun if you like frantically battling an AI opponent by launching stuff at each others bases, while you try to be faster at improving your economy than the enemy.

Games can drag out for quite some time, but it is possible to save during a mission. Campaign matches do not have story and play rather like a sequence of skirmishes against varying difficulty levels of AI that you can choose 2 of for each match. There are no other game modes as of writing this review.

The economy is somewhat complex, not overly confusing. The amount of resources you require is all gathered into a general centralized storage and from there you can request them for the production of various components for your missiles, which include recon cameras, guidance systems, engines, camoflage coating and payloads. You will need to scan the opponents base for his buildings and try to take out key structures, while potentially protecting your own with Anti Missile Launchers. Resource extraction is done by scanning the minerals in the ground with a drone and then building a refinery on top of it. There you can select a mineral to extract from those that are below the refinery, the more present, the faster it will extract. Construction is done in factories by selecting components and the amount of what you want. Earning money is done by selling excess resources, the money is required to construct additional buildings.

While the game had multiplayer in earlier versions, this was unfortunately scrapped and is gone ever since.

The downside of the game is a rather dated clunky interface (clean, but a bit clumsy to navigate), where you need to use the hotkeys to get real enjoyment out of it in my opinion. There are also problems like resources being sometimes named and sometimes only referred to by icon, which requires you to learn them. The tutorial is also done via help screen messages, not via a dedicated tutorial, so it does not hold your hands as much.

Overall I do recommend the game. Even with the dated interface and the missing multiplayer, the singleplayer skirmishes against the AI are fun, long missions that require your senses to be focused on the objective. Managing to hit key structures in your opponents infrastructure is very satisfying and building various missiles of different qualities and strengths and using them correctly is enjoyable. If you do not like long skirmish missions against an AI, I do not recommend this game. Also if you do not like micromanagement intensive gameplay with not much happening except for when that crucial missile is launched, this game might not be for you.

Personally I hope that the sales of Steam do encourage the developer to maybe bring back multiplayer if possible, which was very fun while it was in the game.

Very disappointing, even at the price as it's so close to being at least decent but the UI quirks and design decisions really add up to something subpar.

And the premise looks so good at first: a combination of the SNES game Metal Marines with the missile and mining focus of Fragile Allegiance, two great tastes that should go great together but just falls short of those expectations. Like Metal Marines, you play on your own little square of the world and your opponent settles on another, and you attack each other by launching surgical strikes, and like Fragile Allegiance, you make most of your cash and weapons through the refining of minerals. It's not quite as in-depth as either, but on paper it at least seems like it SHOULD be an interesting streamlining of those two games.

But it isn't. In Fragile Allegiance, complicated though it was, at least had more interesting decisions: resources were limited and prone to boom and bust cycles when sold on the open or black market, so you really did have to question whether it was worth making a mega-missile or selling the ore and allocating those funds someplace else. When an asteroid went dry, would you keep it as a population center for passive income? A heavily-defended storage facility to funnel all your materials into? A giant industrial complex that shipped in things from elsewhere and put out fleets and nukes? Or would you just strap a giant engine on it and ram it into a rival corp's colony?

In Direct Hit, there's none of that. You just make missiles, launch recon warheads to find what you're looking for, and then slam more damaging rockets into them. I would've loved to have seen if the full tech tree offered anything more interesting, but for whatever reason there's no customizable skirmish mode whatsoever for you to play with and see everything right off the bat.

Not that I would've had the patience to stick with it anyway because of the ridiculous interface and design decisions Polynetix has made. For one thing, buildings can't be rotated at all. In most games this wouldn't be a problem but every structure has one or more power-connection points that need to be attached to your settlement's power grid. If you want to set up your windmill farms vertically then too bad. You also can't click and drag when placing buildings, each must be placed with an individual click. Constructed builds can be demolished but not moved, which immediately becomes a pain since you start every map by having to place your dropship, but you can set it down and end up covering a convenient patch of ore; all of a sudden a field of handy metallium becomes unobtainium because you've inadvertently blocked your own access to it. It would've been such an easy fix to just make the dropship a kind of do-it-all building (which it already sort of is since it handles trade and provides some power) that can maybe mine at a slower rate than refineries, but they didn't think to do that.

The research is really nothing special and has a pretty silly tier to it where building your first lab unlocks military tech, but you need a second one to research economics. Why not just let me choose either one right off the bat and then I can make the decision to make another lab if I want to speed things up? I don't even get a new, different-looking econ lab to make things more interesting. Though, that's probably appropriate since seemingly all the econ techs are just boring "you now do this plus whatever percent better" rather than anything cool. There's also no easily-glanced-at percentage bar on the main screen to show how far along your research has progressed, you have to look into the science menu every time.

And the combat system itself might've been passable but, once again, the UI cripples it. The way it works is you have access to two kinds of silos: AMLs, which shoot down incoming missiles, and CMLs, which launch them at your opponent. Whenever an enemy launches something at you, the garbled, barely-intelligible robot announcer lets you know, and you then have to click on the radar menu and then on any of the available AML missile buttons to launch them at the incoming rockets. There's no automation; you can't just stock up on interceptors and tell the computer how many missiles you want to launch at each incoming attack, you HAVE to micromanage. I can only imagine how irritating this would get in the later missions against a more tenacious AI.

Attacking isn't so hot either: you make the missiles in a factory, and they're equally distributed to each CML. I never figured out how to shift inventories between different silos as they can each hold up to like ten missiles, and once a rocket's been prepped for launch, you CANNOT switch them out for another until it's been fired. But most egregious of all with this is that you load rockets and set their targets on the same menu... but despite there being a giant "MISSILE READY" button on the bottom right of the screen, you DON'T click that to launch it. Instead, you have to click to another tab in the radar/rocket menu and launch it from there. Keeping in mind this same screen contains a list of every rocket you launch, which would be fine were it not for the fact that the list DOESN'T SCROLL AT ALL, forcing you to manually click on every previously shot rocket since your ready-to-launch ones are near the bottom of the list, which causes the screen to switch over to the opponent's view and forces you to go back to the rocket menu and clear the other past launches one by one. You can't even right-click to dismiss them without snapping your view to the impact site. It's like a window back to 1997 strategy-sim gaming, only even games like Fragile Allegiance and MoO2 had some elegance to their controls despite being far more complex.

It almost could've been something sorta-simple-yet-decent, an alright super-budget title to waste an afternoon or two on, but it just ends up being a dud thanks to several design screwups. Not recommended.

Interesting, kinda fun, rough around the edges, and with some instances of charmingly broken english that made me think of playing old import games from when I was a young kid.

Apparently the devs are newish - which makes me feel like this is absolutely a game worth buying to see what they do next. (Hopefully hire a translator and get some GUI assistance in!)

Basically? This game is the boardgame 'Battleship' with a little city builder mixed in. Hurl missiles at the enemy's map while defending your own side, while building factories and mines to produce more missiles. Not the most amazing game out there, but certainly a different one, and totally worth the cheap and cheerful price.

(PS: Similar in concept to Metal Marines, but a very different feel.)

While this game is conceptually sound, and can be fun and interesting to play, I would note the following:

Some of the gameplay at higher levels becomes rote, and repetitivly in "How much can I spam anti-missile launchers while spamming missile components.

Further, some of the later game sessions can take anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours.

This is however, rendered devastatingly into a massive failure by the games current intensive inclination towards crashing when complex actions occur, as well as the comically bugged save load feature. If you want to reach higher levels in this game, be prepared to waste two hours of your life, or 45 minutes of your life if the game neither A) Crashes/hangs on Saving or B) Crashes/hangs on loading.

If you do play it, I would recommend you avoid clicking too fast on the missile launchers (The game crash which I finally gave up on at level 6), and in general concentrating on AMLs. Also, DO NOT ATTACK BATTERIES. It would appear that event handling in this program cannot handle the checkstates induced from a large battery farm losing access to its substation at once. This extends to wind farms as well. Leave them alone, and simply focus on surgically strike the dropship and outposts. You really don't even need nukes to win at higher levels. This is the achilles heel of this game: Many of the higher level technologies, while great, are unnecessary. Once you get chaff and ECM, there is no real point at mounting higher missle casings unless you just want overkill. Just focus early on AMLs and economy, spam recon at 45 minutes, and then start taking down Radars > Outposts > Dropship

All this taken into consideration, for its price, concept, and some of the innovative fun, I would recommend it. Hopefully in a few months someone will patch the coding that appears to be rather lousy in certain sections.

I like the concept of each player trying to build up their base on their own map and only shooting missiles at each other, but it's not very well executed. You spend all your time micromanaging problems like having enough storage space. The interface is clumsy too. It ends up being more frustrating than fun.

Just trying to maniplate the terrain is IMPOSSIBLE! - Struggle, Struggle, Struggle - You need FLAT terrain to run electrical and supply lines - however, there isn't enough FLAT terrain anywhere! - so you're given a tool to try and do something with the terrian (represented in little triangular shapes that really don't show up or down slope) - you click the tool, nothing! click it again, still nothing!.. Click it again and BOOM!.. there's a boom and what looks like a cloud of 'Hey something happened"... only NOTHING much did happen!

Trust me.. Opening terrain looks NOTHING like the video - there's barely enough flat area to plant your first building!.. let alone try and connect anything to it... SAVE your money!...

Direct Hit: Missile War is one of the Best Si-Fi RTS Game.
If you are looking for a good Si-Fi RTS game and want to see somthing diffrent from other RTS...then Direct Hit: Missile War is best one.
Future Tech Buildings and diffrent Missile Technology feel us diffrent experience.
We can Play campaing with two diffrent Opponent if we wan to play with Easy difficulty then we may go for easy opponent and if we want to play Hard then go for a another opponent with High or Medium Difficulty at the starting.
OR we may go for easy at starting to get unlocked some Advanced Missile Tech then you may go for High or Medium Difficult opponent.--- so the Stratagy is depend on you.

Over all.... I setsfy with this game.
I also shared some screen shot of this game for Public on my steam.

Requires micromanagement. Needs refinements to be fun. I wanted to like this game, because I like the idea of a missle command game. Everywhere I look in this game, I see an unnecesary roadblock to do what I want. This game takes time to figure out (which is acceptable for complex games) but you do not get much help. Confusing tutorial screens only hint at how the game works. There is a large basebuilding component to the game, but you cannot rotate the buildings. Precious space is wasted trying to accomadate this artificial limitation. When I want to build missles, I must first build all the parts myself. This might be ok, but the build screen in the factory is so clunky that you waste a fair amount of time trying to say what you want to build. You cannot choose amounts of things to build, you can only slowly increase the count one by one. (The count is not increasable in, say fives or tens). You can also choose to build as many as materials allow, but I don't want to store that many. You can also not queue different types of production, so after building 5 missle engines, you must wait for the production run to complete before you begin to 5 missle cameras, and so on. After you do manage to build a missle, you must target and fire them one by one unless you have multiple launch facilities, despite the launch center having six visible missle tubes on it. Once you fire the missle into the unknown enemy area, the lowest level recon missle reveals a 3x3 grid of squares of a perhaps 50x50 enemy playing field. Once I had fired 5 such missles into the enemy area and found nothing at all, I realized i was having no fun. Other imperfections include needing to cancel out of screens you are in to defend against incoming missles (there should be a reliable direct way), a thiiin story, and a background song that plays only once before being silent.

I'm assuming later technologies will make attacking and scouting the enemy more easy, but I'm not willing to suffer through the battles needed to get them.

So, what would it take to make this game fun? Once a missle is designed, I should be able to build them directly at the factory. Allow quicker and better control over the numbers of things I'm building or selling. Make it easier to plan and fire vollies of missles.

The game's pace of the AI is a real problem.

Any development on future content / updates are abandoned.

Overall found the game lacking in fulfilment.

Has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get over that, Direct Hit is a fun and complex game. You build your base, mine, develop weapons, and your opponent does the same on their separate map. There's an impressive tech tree and designing different types of missiles, and seeing the result of firing them is fun. Recommended.