Opponents in the game include evil dragons with and without riders and other flying monsters such as manticores, wyverns, sivak draconians and beholderkin known as gas spores.

The story starts halfway through the action of the previous title, War of the Lance, after the metallic dragons joined the fight alongside the Knights of Solamnia, and it ends roughly at the same time, with a major victory of the forces of the god Paladine.

[citation needed] Despite an almost identical title screen and box cover, it is noticeably different from versions of the game for other systems: instead of being a first-person flight simulator, it is a top-down scrolling shooter, with only 14 missions instead of the original 40.

[3] Computer Gaming World in 1990 called DragonStrike "a superlative and innovative product" that appealed to both fantasy and simulation gamers, although the magazine wished that it could import Gold Box characters.

[6] A reviewer at GameSpy stated that "Westwood [Studios] was finally hitting its stride as a developer with another forgotten classic and badly underrated DragonStrike".