When Air Force Delta Strike begins, the EDAF has begun a desperate counterattack. They've stepped up their recruiting, and the volunteers are immediately rushed to the front lines.

One of those volunteers is Lieutenant Ken Thomas, a laconic fighter pilot, callsign Crow. He's one-third of the Third Element of the 4th Composite Squadron of the 27th Fighter Wing, also known as the Delta Squadron. Delta is a group of irregulars within an irregular army, a new squad with a bad reputation. It doesn't help that Ken's wingmen are, respectively, a self-absorbed moron with delusions of grandeur and an inexperienced woman trying to live up to her father's legacy.

Air Force Delta Strike is the latest installment of a series that's appeared on the SNES, Dreamcast, Game Boy, GBA, and Xbox. It's an aerial action game with a universal adaptor; by pressing Select in-game, you can change Delta Strike from an arcade-esque third-person game, with the camera fixed slightly behind and above your plane; to a traditional-looking flight sim, where you witness the action from inside your cockpit; to a sort of first-person shooter, where you look straight through the cockpit window, with only your crosshairs blocking your view.

I don't recommend you take the last option, really, as if you do, you'll miss out on a lot of the jet models. The backgrounds are, truth to tell, a little blase, but the planes in Delta Strike are something to see. Konami's really done their homework here; many of the planes are modeled after real-world counterparts, right down to moving rudders and opening afterburners.

In each mission, assisted by at least two wingmen and your operator, Amelia (who is clearly related in some way to one Yomiko Readman), you'll be sent into a combat situation to destroy things and mess people up. Most operate on a ten-minute time trial, where you must achieve your goals quickly or fail the mission. Sometimes you'll have to take out enemy fighters, or disrupt an OCC supply train; other times, you're simply sent out for reconaissance. The course of the war will take you all over the planet, from coastline to desert, and even up into space.

Your plane dives, climbs, and banks surprisingly realistically, and will stall out if you try to climb too fast or too steeply. You can't perform any really spectacular aerial stunts--at least, to start with--but trust me, you won't notice their absence. In the meantime, you've got anti-aircraft guns to bomb, enemy fighters to shoot down, and critical OCC targets to blow off the face of the planet.

More importantly, if you've got serious money, there's a no-doubt-law-abiding gentleman named Harry who sets up shop in the EDAF airbase. If you've got the credits, he's got more planes for you, ranging from futuristic spacecraft to old WWII models. Somewhere in the game, you can even pick up a Vic Viper, the fighter jet featured in Konami's Gradius series.

Due in large part to the sheer number of planes you can buy--and there are a lot, each with their own strengths and vulnerabilities--Delta Strike is an adaptable, intense shooter, with a certain amount of that anime feel to it. You've got the quiet guy with no sense of humor, the painfully earnest girl with glasses, the vaguely tomboyish woman trying to live up to an impossible idea, the utter bastard with some small justification for his conviction that he's the best fighter pilot who ever lived, the lothario fighter pilot whose wingmen are a pair of flirtatious Frenchwomen, the brash young kid who might be twelve, his amused older wingmen, the extremely old guy (well, okay, he's fifty-two, but this is a Japanese game; he clearly started his career dogfighting pterodactyls) who's able to take on fighter jets in an old WWII prop plane... they're all here, they've all got at least decent voice acting, and they're all brought to "life" via hand-drawn pictures. I want to say that the character designs are from the same guy who did the drawings for Ring of Red and the last two Suikoden games, but I could be wrong. Either way, the game's got some great 2D art.