Released on 23 October 2012 by the label Fade To Mind, Desert Strike garnered generally favorable reviews from professional music journalists and landed on Spin magazine's list of the "Best Dance Albums of 2012."

Fade to Mind's press release for Desert Strike described the extended play as "the synthesis of terror and child-like wonder, to the strategies of imagination and gaming.

[5] Similar to Qadiri's previous records, Desert Strike has a sound palette primarily consisting of 1980s and 1990s-style digital keyboard replications of instruments such as choirs, horns, steel drums, organs, gunshots and explosions.

"[1] Jackson analyzed the choir sounds "give the EP a somewhat uneasy feel, serving as either the source of a particular song's eeriness or alternately providing a touch of angelic air to the procession, depending on what they are paired along with.

[13] The Fader summarized the video, "Collapsing real life war footage into vintage video game animations and original CGI wizardry, Alex Gvojic depicts an imaginary weapon of mass destruction called the "Ghost," supernaturally animated by djinn, a spirit in Islamic mythology believed to influence the minds and hearts of men by incarnating itself in various living forms.

[1] Numerous journalists, including Carey Waggoner and Gibb, compared the sound quality of Desert Strike to Qadiri's previous release Genre Specific Xperience (2011).

[14] As Gibb opined, "Most tracks here are strong enough to exist by themselves, but lacking the drive of Genre-Specific Xperience, at times they feel frustratingly fragile, beautiful and absorbing miniatures that could be scattered to the wind within a fraction of a second.