The game can be crushingly difficult, but it always remains engrossing. Despite going back and forth between loving and hating it, I’m still addicted some 20 hours later.
Strife hides a merciless challenge behind his well crafted Nineties costume. Not only old-style FPS lovers can find death on Icarus but also who's searching for a demanding moment of pure gore. Perhaps different levels of difficulty could have expanded the audience.
Don't believe the reviews. STRAFE has enormous potential. As a kickstarter backer, I can't say I didn't get what I paid for. I can't speak for the optimization issues, as the game runs fine for me, but they have a solid foundation for future balancing. As mentioned elsewhere, it pushes the "Game of 1996" look for all its worth and aesthetically, the game absolutely **** and has a pretty kickass soundtrack besides, I'm glad I sprung for that reward tier and am looking forward to getting my music. The guns feel effective and varied. My particular favorite is the disc launcher mode for the railgun, which calls to mind the Ripjack of Unreal fame. Enemies are as dumb as you'd expect from a game meant to be 21 years old, gibs fly everywhere and the "Murderzone" mode is pretty great as well, a wave survival mode with persistent upgrades unlocked when you reach certain point milestones. It is also immensely satisfying to successfully complete a run. I noticed by the time I had reached the forth zone that I had started trembling. STRAFE successfully captures the intensity of the 90s shooter, even if it doesn't 100% play like one.
That being said, STRAFE goes so hard for capturing the feel of a 90s fps that it incorporates things I really DIDN'T like about them, namely, the blistering difficulty. You also have to look for keycards, but it's immensely downplayed from the old days. Quake 1 was hard, let's not kid ourselves. Mixing that style of gunplay with roguelike level generation should be a no-brainer, but in practice it makes the game harder then it needs to be: Quake wasn't stingy with health, armor and ammo pickups because you absolutely needed them all to succeed. STRAFE, being a roguelike, is by nature incredibly stingy with drops and punishes you for even incidental damage taken, which is incredibly hard to avoid in a game like this. It looks and feels like Quake, but you can't PLAY it like Quake and expect to get very far. Instead, you have to exploit the intentionally stupid AI and funnel enemies into killzones, making it feel more like Half-Life, only considerably less forgiving. You also have to reload, which if nothing else requires you to be a bit pickier with your shots.
I am forced to lump STRAFE in the same category of roguelikes as CTHON, Sublevel Zero and Enter the Gungeon, where punishing difficulty is supposed to be an advertised feature instead of a drawback. It's a little more fair then Gungeon, though. I have to go once again on record that I don't dislike hard games outright: Bloodborne, Devil May Cry and of course, Quake are among my favorite games. but I don't believe in using difficulty in place of content, and I think STRAFE suffers from that a bit. You should absolutely give it a try you're at all curious, as it's still an infinitely better purchase then any "Triple A" shooters. I just think it could have used some kind of progression system a la UNLOVED or Immortal Redneck, which, I admit, might sound blasphemous to a fan of 90s shooters or 90s games in general. Or at least a difficulty selector. I mean, Quake had one of those.
Strafe (PC) while not old-school shooter (no, its not) is a great game and fun to play. It has its flaws but it has also many great elements like good weapons, lots of secrets, easter eggs and balanced difficulty (it's hard but not as hard as many players are reporting). For me it's solid 8.
Strafe succeeds at being a suitable homage of referential nostalgia-laden trinkets, but there’s no other real reason you should play it. If you want the feel of an old shooter, you should probably go play one of those instead of Strafe.
STRAFE is a roguelike FPS that tries too hard to remind us of “the good old times”, but since it lacks any depth and quality, it fails hard on every level. The game is a mix of horrible graphics (although that was the excuse for the XX century feel), awful story (again “on purpose”), one of the worst AI opponents ever and questionable shooting.
As an "old" video game player who experienced the early FPS, I thougth Strafe was for me. It was, and it wasn't.
The novelty of "random levels" wears off pretty quickly, and dying (mostly because of "deprecating" twitch skills) led me to play only using the Easy level. The game started to be enjoyable (and "understandable") for me even with all its defaults (like the weak game feel, the unreadable map, the weird save system...)
So for me it wasn't the "rinse and repeat" type of game it is supposed to be ; but more a "play-it-in-one-go-and-that's-enough". So recommended, but with caution.
Strafe tries hard to remind you of the old school shooters, tweaking here and there for a relatively fresh yet familiar experience. The only problem is that it tries too hard.
"So Tight!", "not really?". I played the early release copy and this version has come a long way. However the game certainly needs some balancing and polish to really excel. Enemies make zero noise so spawning behind you often is frustrating, enemies all rush you and path finding within levels is linear to non existent, rather than encouraging you to move around the space you simply backpedal and bunny hop about which ends up less serviceable than slow rolling the game picking enemies off, which isn't all that fun in this game, weapons feel weak especially if you boost through grouping packs and the shooting ends up as bullet sponge tedium, armor and ammo costs way too much. The entirely random nature of it really adds little to the gameplay, it would be better served if it was designed carefully and balanced throughout with multiple difficulties ala 90s shooters, so its sort of as if these guys didn't really play shooters in the 90s? The rouge style format simply doesn't feel suitable inside this game and takes away much of the fun with many runs just being a depressing slew of horrible weapons, upgrades and level layouts, something that wouldn't crop up otherwise. The procedural nature certainly provides more re-playability in theory, but ultimately just boils down to being more frustrating and repetitive than adding anything interesting or fun to the game. I like the games style and it's fun, but in the end it kind of ends up being aggressively repetitive, unbalanced and tedious like so many rouge style games do. Rule number one of a shooter is that a gun can never be too powerful, this game makes the classic mistake of confusing difficulty with tedium and thats a shame. Perhaps after some balancing and design changes this could be a fun game to rip through but currently, just spool up a copy of the Marathon 2 or Quake 2 if you feel the need for some throwback 90s style shooting. Also why the **** is the Wolf3D throwback arcade stack in game got no mouse support, makes it impossibly lame and basically impossible on PC.
It had potential and unfortunately performance issues exist that don't make sense given the intentionally dated visuals. It's somewhat enjoyable though.
What a nuisance I took. I do not know what to expect as water from May, but surely one expects something good if you love that classic generation of FPS ... and well, the bugs theme completely discards the purchase for its normal price. We will see in the future, but it does not give me any good thorn.
SummaryStrafe is a roguelike first-person shooter which promises to push the limits of computer-generated photorealism and hardcore sci-fi action into unimaginable territory.