KickStarter STRAFE® - fast-paced, gib-fest FPS with procedural generation, 1996©

[tormund]

"Procedurally generated levels" is a music to my ears!

PC Gamer's ever valuable insight.

 

[Mastermind]

They spent their budget on an ironic video that spoofs "eXXXtreme gaming" ads, but doesn't show us anything about the game except that it is gory. Then they released a tech video where they also don't show us anything about the game except that it is gory. They also made a 1996 Geocities-style page where they also don't show us anything about the game except that it is gory, and procedurally generated. Then they launched a Kickstarter campaign where they also don't show us anything about the game except that it is gory, ironic and it is not a cover shooter with recharging health.

I am fully convinced their priorities are in the right place, and this will be a gameplay experience on par with the original Quake. After all, Quake was all about hilarious amounts of gore.

Quake was shit, i don't understand how it became so popular. FPSs peaked with Doom 2.

 

[Excidium II]

FPSs peaked with Duke3D/Blood/SW

FTFY

 

[Mastermind]

Those games had style but gameplay wise they can't hold up to doom.

 

[Excidium II]

Also Doom > Doom 2.

 

[Tito Anic]

Looksl like Quake 2 in Minecraft engine, SNAFU.

 

[Melan]

If someone is interested, here is the release date:

 

[Siveon]

Probably gonna be hard to get any coverage with all the Switch hoopla that'll happen around that time. Though they're not really related so it might do alright.

Not a for me, but personally I'll take a look if there's another demo or cheap bundle.

 

[Boleskine]

This comes out tomorrow.

 

[Excidium II]

Looks so bad. Minecraft grafics and really bad shooting feedback. Games were better than this in 1996.

 

[warpig]

They can't even do 90s nostalgia properly

 

[Boleskine]

IGN gives it a 6.3

STRAFE REVIEW

Not all's fair in this Quake-themed roguelike.

Spoiler

BY LEIF JOHNSON Strafe wants you to go fast. I felt it pushing me to blaze through its levels as quickly as I used to race through the original Quake in 1996, and I'd love nothing more than to oblige. And yet here I am, three stages in, carefully and methodically picking off charging Gluttons and waist-high robots who aim annoyingly well. I know now that death in Strafe comes far more easily than it ever did in id's landmark first-person shooter, and this is the first time in hours I've made it so far without taking much damage. I'm feeling good. And that's why I howl in rage when I take an elevator down and get instantly slaughtered by swarms of enemies from both behind and in front when I arrive at the bottom. I had no chance. Game over. Back to the beginning.

That's been my experience for much of Strafe. It bleeds '90s personality and nails so much about the early shooter experience while mixing it with today's craze for roguelike-style procedural generation and single-life runs, but too often it shoots itself in the foot with its unfair randomization, miserly access to armor and ammo boosts, and some lethal bugs.

It's easy to fall in love with Strafe early on, particularly if you're like me and remember when its rough, first-generation 3D graphical aesthetic looked like the cutting edge. Barely a minute goes by before I'm giggling at the scratchy VHS-like full-motion video tutorial featuring an actress in a dead-on '90s 'do explaining the controls with suggestive quips. Killing enemies makes them erupt in fountains of blood and guts (known as “gibs” if you’re over 30), allowing their mess to serve as a gruesome cookie-crumb trail should you get lost. Limbs sometimes fly off before foes die in a welcome nod to popular mods like Brutal Doom. At the end of each stage, you get a rundown crammed with old standby stats such as how many headshots you landed, but it also works in stuff like how many gallons of blood you supposedly spilled and makes snarky references to your cause of death.
And most of the time, at least, the procedural generation works well. No matter how many times I had to start over (and there were many, many times), each new playthrough unfolded wildly differently than the last. Sometimes I'd enter the Icarus spaceship that serves as the setting and find myself looking down a spiral staircase with gluttons rushing up toward me, while at other times I might find myself in wide-open rooms where zombie-like creatures cling to the walls like evil Spider-Men. In time, I saw it all so much that I grew to learn to spot where the pre-made pieces fit together, but never so well that rushing through was a breeze.

It helps that Strafe’s gunplay usually satisfies, even though the guns always feel like they would benefit from a bit more "oomph" or originality. You start off by choosing a permanent one – a shotgun, a laser gun, or a machine gun – but I had the most fun when picking up the rocket launchers, nail guns, pistols, and other firearms scattered about the entrail-splattered floors and emptying their limited ammo before switching back to the defaults.

The trouble began when I started to notice I was being led astray too often. For example, because of the ancient-looking art style and its intentionally blocky textures, sometimes it's hard to make out the elevating platforms from the surrounding walls, making me wonder for a bit if Strafe had created a level that's impossible to escape. Worse, one of the most important elements is a vending machine that lets you buy armor or extra ammo for piles of scrap dropped from enemies, and often these get placed right underneath acid-spewing turrets that are sometimes impossible to avoid. I’d have been fine with no vending machine at all, but putting them where I can see them but not reach them is just rubbing salt in the wound.

And there were times when I couldn't use them even when I could reach them. Whoever's running the show on the Icarus is an evil punk who charges outrageous prices for those armor and ammo boosts, to the point that I almost never had enough scrap to buy more when I needed it. Usually, I'd end up clearing most of the level and working my way back to the machines, and sometimes even then I wouldn't be able to scrape together enough scrap.

Maybe I wouldn’t be in such dire need of more health if Strafe played a little fairer. For instance, the way most enemies make no sound when they're charging mindlessly toward you in droves seems like a cheap shot. Not only do you not usually hear anything without a gun coming, but they can whack off most of your armor with just a couple of swipes of their pipes or whatever else they're carrying before you even know they’re there. And just like that, painstaking runs with careful maneuvering get ruined in seconds. Especially after Devil Daggers recently showed us just how important sound can be to threat awareness, it’s strange that this similarly old-school game didn’t follow suit. (It’s even more bizarre considering Strafe includes a Devil Daggers-themed power-up.)

I can't help but feel decisions like this ruin the gameplay that Strafe seems to be aiming for. Rather than running through levels as I would in Quake, the severe paranoia left me creeping through each level, sneakily luring enemies into chokepoints and sniping them from afar when I could. And sometimes even then I'd get stuck in seemingly no-win situations like the elevator one described above, where I'd end up in a rough spot and die no matter how many precautions I took. It took many hours just to clear the first of four zones – and I’ve yet to get further than the third. (But of course, this style of game is meant to be beaten only by the most practiced of players.) The randomization keeps the experience of restarting again and again fresh, yes, but somehow it's never quite so rewarding as learning the secrets of deliberately designed levels like you find in id’s old (or new, for that matter) shooters. As if these intentional design decisions weren't enough of a kick in the teeth, sometimes I'd have to restart because I got inexplicably (and inextricably) stuck on the geometry of enemy bodies or shot dead by an enemy firing straight through a locked door. At least it generally runs well otherwise (as you’d expect from a game that looks like it’s fresh out of the ‘90s) aside from some jittery framerates when taking the chutes to the next stages or choosing your weapons at the very beginning. Presumably, that’s due to the computer’s resources being taken up by generating the level you’re about to die in.

That doesn’t sound great, I know – but it's a measure of how well Strafe captures the mid-'90s shooter experience that I never grew tired of booting it up even after hours of repeated punishment. There's a lot of fun here in its randomized levels, and I believe all that it would take to turn it into something wonderful is reducing the price on its armor and ammo boosts to give you a fighting chance even when the deck is so thoroughly stacked against you. Survival would feel like it had a little more to do with skill and strategy than blind luck, and it'd do a better job of capturing that speedy Quake action. As it is, it demands almost immaculate gameplay to survive even the first few stages, to say nothing of the entire 12-stage game, and even then it takes a fair amount of luck to make it very far. Even Quake was never quite so unforgiving.

The Verdict
When it works, Strafe is a generally entertaining retro-styled shooter that mixes procedurally generated levels into an experience strongly reminiscent of Quake. It's a great concept that usually comes together, but between the quirks of randomization, powerful enemies that run almost completely silent, lethal bugs, and hefty costs for vital armor and ammo powerups, a lot of the time it feels as challenging as rolling the dice and coming up with double sixes.

OKAY
Strafe is bursting with personality but feels unfair too often to be the test of old-school FPS skill it wants to be.
8 MAY 2017
6.3i

 

[Metro]

If IGN didn't like it that much then it's probably good.

 

[Tytus]

The guy from Polygon that played Doom should give this a go too. I'm especially interested in video material of his gameplay

 

[Daedalos]

So minecraft pixel gore generic shoottaaan gayme?

It looks incredibly shitty.

 

[Boleskine]

More reviews:

PCGamer - 72/100

Spoiler

Strafe has all the Quake action figures. It cosplayed as a Doomguy during last year’s gaming convention. When Quake 2 gave itself a ‘Strogg Life’ tattoo one night, Strafe got it as a bumper sticker. It roves among the polycarbonate canyons of its local PC software store, itching for a conversational gauntlet thrown at its authority of all things FPS, its fingers pre-curled to push its glasses up its nose and huff that actually, you can stunlock a Cacodemon with the chainsaw.

Strafe proudly wears its influence on its sleeve—and its other sleeve, and its pant leg, and both jacket pockets. As a shooter, it’s the personified desire to convince Mom to buy a Voodoo2 card. As a roguelike, it’s that one cabinet shoved shrine-like into the arcade’s darkest corner and reverently avoided for its quarter-gobbling reputation. As both, it hooked me into sinking over 10 hours into it, but as we parted ways, I felt I’d retread too-familiar ground.

Full house of blood

Strafe nails its chosen genre’s fascination with death, packaging a single-life slaying spree with deliberate visual anachronisms and a speed matching id’s formative titans. Developer Pixel Titans punched the time machine back to 1996 and broke off the abort lever. I loved the efficacy of Strafe’s low-poly look plucking at old memories—like marveling at the first glimpse of accelerated graphics—and it showed in the sparking bulbs, blocky geometry, and dynamic lava glows peppering each map.

Video director Thom Glunt and programmer Stephen Raney’s background in commercial and music video production lends an eye for finer details on presentation. Small, respectful nods are everywhere in Strafe: the Doom-like screen melt on starting a new game, wall elevators, a dial-up modem screech mixed as an level exit door sound effect, and, of course, a tracking-smudged FMV training film with just enough Z-list schlock to set the right mood. My favorite hat-tip was Glunt and Raney’s appearance as a pair of tombstones, the sort of cheeky self-insertion I would stumble upon in hidden credit rooms from classic shooters.

In spite of its insistence at being a roguelike, Strafe’s combat is move-and-shoot twitchy simplicity. Enemies barrel at me when I get close, and I barrel at them in turn with, yes, generous strafing as needed. Sticking with WASD provides enough control to survive most encounters with simple sidesteps and backpedals. Quake-robatics such as bunnyhopping and strafejumping are certainly possible, but I mostly stuck to slapping the spacebar as a reactive move to avoid being cornered instead of using it to enhance my movement. I was fond of the increasing variety of foes—pipe-swinging goons, hooded pistoleers, walking turrets, giant rock brutes, zombie sniper babes, among plenty others—as I improved and braved later levels, but that assortment felt slightly wasted on the single-minded AI’s tendency to beeline straight into my gun’s barrel.

Still, I enjoyed plenty of thrills. Strafe’s procedural generation carpets each room with enemies or stuffs them behind sliding wall panels and crumbling rock faces. Every digit of shields or health I lost crept me closer to permadeath, an interesting distillation of traditional roguelike decision-making into the FPS’s raw input dexterity. I savored the rising panic of surviving for just a few more seconds to sprint into the exit door or to grab a critical keycard, and the clang of a new monster closet opening up somewhere left swivel tracks on my mousepad.

My silent companion—one of three primary guns, a shotgun, an assault rifle, or a railgun—packed plenty of kinetic punch, but I wished each would scream instead of whimper. The shotgun, dutifully saluting its FPS role as a close-range cleaver, sounded like a popping balloon. I leaned on the railgun’s headshot magic for clearing rooms from a distance, but I could barely hear the zap above the ambient din. I had to leave the assault rifle behind after a few runs—I liked the small touch of its barrel smoke effect, but its bullets and increasing spread felt weak compared to its brothers. I vastly preferred and enjoyed the various pickup weapons—pulse guns, SMGs, disc launchers, and others—scattered throughout each floor, once again a call-back to the old days of amassing an arsenal and flick-swapping with the mousewheel.


The 1996-ification of Strafe’s violence shows best in its copious bloodshed, the heavily marketed “uber-gore,” chunks of viscera dousing walls and floors with organ juice. It’ll elicit silly giggles and pauses to mentally snapshot the sheer ridiculousness of 10-second long crimson fountains. But the spectacle eventually wore off—Gallagher only smashed so many watermelons—so I drew larger value from the lingering stains acting as a gruesome breadcrumb trail showing where I had yet to explore.

Lagging
There’s no question, then, that Strafe is a game about the memory of a game made in the 1990s. And it’s hard for Strafe’s other aspects to pull away from that ‘remember-when’ approach. It feels as if Pixel Titans expended most of its effort crafting a believable simulacrum but lost steam past that. Strafe struggles to climb above its foundation. It covers guns, shooting, enemies, movement, and a conclusionary boss fight, but that’s it—I may as well have fished out my Final Doom CD for the same retro timewarp. Other nostalgia-centric games such as Shovel Knight and Spelunky lingered in the community’s eye not for their precise mimicry but for their elaboration.

The roguelike procedural generation further seemed at odds with classic shooters’ meticulous map layouts and item placements. The rooms and areas Pixel Titans has fashioned offer excellent spatial variety and verticality. Functionally, they’re great murder boxes. But a large slice of the ‘90s shooter’s soul was the handcrafted maps that would architecturally make little sense but imprint upon a player’s mind like a second home with fond memories of where to get the shotgun or the hidden super health alcove. Strafe’s rooms are built by hand, but their cohesiveness is less a mark of inspired ingenuity and more pieces of code Lego-snapping everything from a randomized asset pool. If Strafe’s objective is indeed a look back at the FPS family of old, it does so more shallowly than it would’ve liked.

Smaller issues nibble into Strafe’s appeal. I’m glad for the Unity engine’s diligence at handling the abundant ammo casings, severed heads, and gory chunks of spatter like a champ, holding steady framerates of around 90 to over 100 on my 8GB RAM and GTX 970 system. Yet the clutter teetered on overly dense at times, and I occasionally had trouble eyeballing important pickups and ammo packs littered among all the scattered junk. Obtuse symbols on the HUD beyond utilitarian health and ammo counts created a foggy picture of passive bonuses picked up from special canisters found in crates, and I had trouble understanding just how each perk affected my gameplay. A few bugs amplified the difficulty at times, including enemies shooting through walls and getting stuck in invisible holes or against corners.

Equally head-scratching and more egregious are Strafe’s limited options, with only three 16:9 resolutions (1280x720, 1600x900, and 1920x1080) in the options menu and an FOV slider spanning a scant 15 degrees between 80 and 95. I realize too much wattage from the GPU would besmirch Strafe’s purposeful look, but I’m left a little dumbfounded at the complete lack of additional 16:9 modes or any 16:10 or ultrawide support whatsoever. On the upside, Strafe’s performance never wavered between windowed and fullscreen modes, and alt-tabbing to the desktop and back was a snappy switch.

On a more subjective note, Strafe’s music, crafted by Kingdom composer ToyTree, is a mash of retrowave synth and electronic beats evoking the pulsing blasts of Carpenter Brut—and it would fit beautifully if Strafe was a game about the 1980s. But that’s not what Strafe loves most. I helped it along by popping in Quake 2’s Rage, and I got that heavier tone of brutality Strafe wanted me to remember. Strafe didn’t mind—it has a signed soundtrack jewel case still in the plastic.

The Verdict
72

Strafe
Strafe skillfully recaptures the look and experience of a full-tilt twitch 1990s shooter while faltering at building upon its potential.

Eurogamer (no score)

A gleefully gory throwback to 90s shooters wrapped in a rogue-like shell, Strafe is let down by uneven pacing and underwhelming guns.

Spoiler

By Rick Lane Published 09/05/2017 Version tested PC

What's the most important component of a good FPS? Is it violence? No. Is it smart level design? That can certainly make your shooter interesting and memorable, but it isn't a prerequisite to enjoyment. Is it fast movement? Again, that won't hurt your chances. But like all these other hallmark elements of FPS design, it isn't as fundamental as ensuring that your guns are fun to fire.

Go back to any of the classic shooters of the mid-90s, and you will find that no matter how badly the graphics have aged, how weird their control schemes are, the weapons they place in your pixelated hands feel absolutely fantastic. Doom's shotgun, Quake's Nailgun, Half Life's revolver, each of them is a masterclass in audio/visual feedback, a bucking, roaring, arm-juddering bringer of death. It's why whatever else they did right or wrong, you can go back to any of them today and still have a great time from the first shot onwards.

This is exactly what I did while playing through Strafe, because from the moment I entered Pixel Titans' procedurally generated love-letter to 1996, my hands and my brain were telling me something wasn't right. The sensation was so unsettling that I had to check I wasn't misremembering my own misspent youth turning big brown polygons into smaller red polygons. So I went back, and undertook a crash-course in the formation of the first-person shooter, 1993 to 1998.

It confirmed my suspicions. From its tongue-in-cheek tutorial to its fountains of gore, Strafe presents a convincing facsimile of a golden-age FPS. Meanwhile, it underpins this aesthetic with a more modern structure, featuring procedurally generated levels and brutally unforgiving permadeath. But none of its innovations or achievements can make up for the fact that it gets the guns wrong.

Before I slice my chainsaw through Strafe's pulsating jugular, let's talk about what it does right, because a lot of love has gone into this game, and I want to like it more than I do. Strafe has you don the helmet of a nondescript soldier-slash-explorer fellow (or fellette, Strafe lets you select gender) travelling through some dark corner of uninhabited space. There is a more specific backstory than this, but in true mid-90s fashion the developers don't particularly care about explaining it. You won't either. From the moment you teleport into the in the belly of the decrepit Starship Icarus, Strafe is a straightforward, relentless bloodbath.

Strafe's crowning achievement is how it transforms technical limitation into a distinct style. Its blocky environments and lumpen enemies are rendered in bright and bold colours, and subtly infused with more modern technologies, such as ragdoll physics and Strafe's unique UBER-GORE system, which paints the environments in levels of blood and giblets that would have caused even the most trick of Intel 486 PCs to violently implode.

Almost as impressive are Strafe's procedural generation algorithms. While each level is randomly assembled, it doesn't look like it. Commencing inside the Icarus, whose narrow corridors and brick-like elevators evoke memories of Doom, Strafe busts out into terrifying alien gorges with glowing acid lakes, and a subterranean research facility connected by its own underground railway. Its structured as a guided tour through FPS history, referencing everything from Duke Nukem to Half Life. Strafe even manages to incorporate traps into its procedural levels, where picking up a keycard will trigger a bunch of walls to open up back along the route you came, spilling more enemies into the level. That's clever. Bloody annoying, but clever.

The later levels are particularly enjoyable to explore. But I wonder how many people will reach them. As well as being an FPS, Strafe is also a roguelike, and it is a fearsome one at that. The first stage throws wrench-wielding madmen and plasma-spitting spiderbots at you in their dozens, while health and armour are alarmingly sparse. To put its difficulty into perspective, a clean run through of Strafe would take you roughly two hours. It took me seven to escape from the Icarus for the first time. Yet after that point things become much more manageable, which presents something of an imbalance. You know what else shooters had back in 1996? Difficulty levels! They may have gently ribbed you for picking an easier option, but at least they asked for your consent to Hurt You Plenty.

As well as uneven pacing, the collision between Strafe as a roguelike and Strafe as a shooter results in some other curious decisions. A few of these work well. For example, every two levels you arrive at a shop that lets you buy permanent upgrades, ranging from deployable traps (not very useful) to faster running speed (essential for survival). Other ideas are less successful. Instead of straightforward pickups, Strafe sports a simple crafting system. Some enemies drop scrap that can be collected and forged into ammo or armour at crafting machines. I found this system antithetical to the game's pace, as it meant I had to keep one eye on how much scrap I had, and regularly needed to backtrack to the nearest machine when I wanted to craft something.

Weirdest of all, at the start of your run you pick one of three guns to wield, a shotgun, a machine gun, or a railgun. That's the gun you will use against 90 per cent of the enemies you shoot. All the other weapons you pick up are disposable. The idea is that you upgrade your starting weapon as you go along, but I often found these upgrades to be less useful than the vanilla firing mode. A particularly bizarre upgrade for the shotgun has it fire three bouncing grenades, which given that Strafe demands precision with almost every shot, is like using a jackhammer to strip wallpaper. Moreover, Strafe is often so intense and the price of death so steep that I was reluctant to experiment with other weapons in case they threw off my timing.

Ultimately though, none of this matters, because Strafe's weapons are, sadly, rubbish. I think the issue stems mainly from sound design. You can tell everything about an FPS from its implementation of the shotgun, and Strafe's boomstick sounds like a chaffinch sneezing when it's been shot. Even explosions severely lack force, and consequently rockets and grenades are nothing like as satisfying as they should be.

Strafe looks and moves like a 90s shooter, but it doesn't sound like a nineties shooter. It lacks the concussive depth of those early icons, the thundering gunfire and crunchy impacts that transform a fairground shooting gallery into a desperate battle for survival.

All this adds up to a game that doesn't feel like a 90s shooter either. Strafe suffers from a kind of weightlessness, an inertia that means although you see the effects of your rampage splattered all around you, you don't feel it in the same way. The best shooters have guns that rattle up your mouse-arm and into your soul, and for all its smart ideas and lavish retro stylings, Strafe struggles to make much of an impact.

Destructoid - 8.5/10

Spoiler

Blast from the past!

My first look at STRAFE was from Destructoid back in 2015. When a successful Kickstarter had funded the game, I became intrigued by a marketing gimmick that centered heavily on "Bleeding Edge Graphics for 1996." I love shooters and 1996 was one of the cornerstone years for the entire genre.

When I finally got hands on time with the game, I was a little saddened to see it was going the route of being a roguelike. I really just wanted a return to old-school classics a la Rise of the Triad, but with good performance. After that initial wave of disappointment, though, I started to understand the hook.

STRAFE is basically Spelunky in first-person, with all the setbacks and accomplishments of its inspiration.

If you’re looking for some kind of story or deeper plot, just stop. STRAFE takes things back to the good old days where gameplay was front and center and narrative took a backseat. That isn’t to say you can’t connect some dots and try to piece together your own story, but STRAFE is really about the experience of playing it.

STRAFE mixes first-person shooters with roguelikes, making for a game that has the aesthetic and mechanics of something like Quake, but the level design and vague nature of Spelunky. Levels are all randomly generated and all pickups (like upgrades, health packs, ammo, etc.) are rarely explained in a clear manner. You get a general idea of how things work by grabbing the bull by the horns and just rolling with it.

The only real gameplay comparison to classic shooters STRAFE has is that combat is entirely projectile based. While the player has weapons which utilize hitscanning (a gameplay technique which calculates bullet trajectory based on crosshair placement), none of the enemies are equipped with such weaponry, which makes the game heavily skill based.

If the shit hits the fan, you can always count on your raw skills to see you through. The real difficulty comes from the sheer amount of enemies, and it sure can feel cheap at times, but you just need to prioritize the biggest threat in a room at every given moment. It harkens back to the reason Doom remains such a classic: enemies are recognizable and allow the player to formulate strategies on the fly.

You start by picking between one of three weapons: a shotgun, a machine gun and a railgun. This is the only weapon you can collect ammo for during your playthrough, as the others work like temporary power-ups. There's an eclectic collection of weapons, each themed around classic FPS tropes like a rocket launcher, a plasma gun, and a pistol, but they have a limited amount of ammo on them. You get roughly 10 shots, though the damage output far exceeds your regular gun.

Thankfully, you don’t need to blow through your extra weapons upon grabbing them. You can always swap back to your default weapon to conserve special ammo for a tough situation. This lends a lot of tactical depth to the combat, letting you decide when the best opportunity will arise to rip out your extra-deadly weaponry.

Enemies are all immediately recognizable by their character models, which helps with prioritization in tight gunfights. There are small grunt-like types that rely solely on melee attacks, so you can often leave them for last in a room. Guys wearing hoods use a slow-moving gun that can easily be dodged, but has a long range on it. Later levels start introducing other enemy types, like suicide bombers, snipers, and heavy grunts, and even the melee combatants start to change up speed statistics or come equipped with armor, further diversifying the enemy pool.

A lot of these enemies are exclusive to specific levels, of which STRAFE features four zones. Each zone has three levels and progression is based on some central gimmick inherent to that zone. The first area focuses on finding keycards or grabbing someone’s head to use on a retina scanner. The second area is about finding bombs and blowing up cave-ins and so on.

It helps that the graphics are basically a replication of the chunky, blocky, early 3D we saw before the turn of the century. In a really cool touch, you can actually make the game look worse in the graphics menu, which then seemingly smears Vaseline all over the screen in an attempt to replicate CRT displays. That is funny for a quick joke, but I honestly couldn’t play with it on for very long. Even without that, you’d be forgiven for thinking STRAFE really was made in 1996.

Reveling more in that late ‘90s style, STRAFE also has extreme gore. When you blast enemies, their limbs will go careening across the map and blood will gush from their heads like an early Tarantino movie. In a surprising show of depth, this actually factors into the gameplay. Certain enemies will spit acid (or have acid blood), so goring a regular meatbag over acid on the ground will completely cover it and negate the damage that you would have received.

As for things specific to this game, STRAFE features two different forms of currency to help players power up and get items or upgrades. The first is scrap, which most enemies will drop in decent quantities. If you go to one of the various workbenches you’ll find in each level, you can craft some armor or ammo packs for yourself. You’ll definitely need to do this, as enemies hit hard.

The second currency is credit chips. These fall from enemies, but in far less quantity. With credit chips, you can take your gains to the shop that appears on every second level (so 1-2, 2-2, etc). While the items that appear in each playthrough are randomized, they offer a wide range of effects like protection from acid, double jump boots, quick dodging, and other various tweaks to the game. My personal favorite has to be regenerating health for getting kills, which is clearly something you’ll be doing a lot of.

There are also upgrade stations for your main firearm that appear randomly. These will augment the standard firing mode of your gun (which you can later redact from a workbench, if you want). You can turn your shotgun into a grenade launcher, your railgun into a burst-fire rifle and your machine gun into a mine-thrower, along with a few others. While fun to tinker with, but it’s usually better to just stick with your default gun.

Finally, there are small pickups you can get that will upgrade things like your firing rate, your guns ammo size, and your accuracy. These aren’t entirely necessary, but it helps with giving you a near-automatic shotgun, for instance. Getting to the later levels and feeling overpowered is great for the nonsense you sometimes encounter.

Being a roguelike, the elements may be unbalanced depending on how the random number generator is feeling. There are some runs I’ve started where I can breeze through the first couple of levels, but if I restart, I’ll get my ass kicked immediately. It doesn’t help that the last zone feels limp, but then the final boss is totally overbearing.

At least there is a fairly diverse assortment of randomized levels. In roughly 10 playthroughs, I had not encountered a repeated segment. When you do start to see them, though, the way the levels interlock always feels organic. It hardly echoes the complexity of classic FPS level design, but it does enough to make you think about how you’re progressing. Backtracking is also not frowned upon, so walking back through the carnage you’ve inflicted is a sort of perverse testament to your skill.

Much like Spelunky, you can find parts to a teleporter in each playthrough that will allow you to immediately skip to specific zones. Doing this requires you to still get to that zone and place the teleporter piece, but at least you don’t have to endlessly repeat similar sections if you’re looking to reach the conclusion.

If you do become bored with continuously trying to “beat” the game, there are a few other modes to try out. From the main menu, you can opt to try a daily speed run, which contains a unique seed that you get one shot at, a weekly speed run, which gives you a small segment and unlimited tries to best, and a horde mode, called Murder Zone.

Murder Zone is the only mode in the game that contains persistent progression. You start with the same three weapon choices from the main game, but after each run, your tally of blood spilled pools up to give you more and more unlocks. Eventually you’ll be able to boot up Murder Zone and start off with extra armor, different weapons, and an item in between each room of enemies.

I also need to make mention of the outstanding soundtrack. The score covers a lot of different themes, ranging from industrial heavy synth rock to slower, methodical pieces that build in energy. I don’t know if the tracks really fit the mood of the scenery, but you’ll constantly be bobbing your head and rocking out.

I may be a bit elated with how well STRAFE turned out, that doesn’t mean the game is free of bugs. While a lot of the more pressing issues are set to be fixed in a day-one patch, I’ve still hit some bugs where textures will render incorrectly, I’ll get trapped in walls and even fall through the world to enter some weird pink-covered dimension that halts progression.

That really doesn’t help when the game is already difficult. Yeah, this is a highly skill-based game, but sometimes an enemy will appear from nowhere and you’ll take unnecessary damage because you couldn’t react. Getting hit also doesn’t do a great job of indicating where you’re taking damage from, which usually leads to taking even more hits. Also, that final boss is bullshit (but maybe I just suck).

Even with all that said, I find myself coming back to STRAFE to try and best its challenges. 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.

STRAFE may not be a classic and it definitely has issues, but it's fun enough for anyone who wants a nostalgia trip. Hopefully others feel the same way, but I kind of expect most people will pass on it. That is their loss.

[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]

Strafe reviewed by Peter Glagowski

8.5
GREAT
Impressive effort with a few noticeable problems holding it back. Won't astound everyone, but is worth your time and cash.

Gamespot - 8/10

Spoiler

This is the run.
by Michael Higham on May 9, 2017

At first glance, Strafe looks as if it's resting on the laurels of the old-school, hyper-fast, and gory first-person shooters from the '90s. Oftentimes, it actually does lean heavily on the likes of Doom and Quake, but working within those confines and introducing a roguelike structure, Strafe emerges as a uniquely thrilling shooter with plenty of charm in its own right. It teeters between being mindlessly fun and cautiously strategic to the backdrop of a perfectly executed electronic soundtrack, teaching you something new with each run.

You play as a space scrapper whose job is to go to the derelict ship Icarus and, well, collect scrap, as told through the game's purposely cheesy FMV tutorial. Nothing else is said as you jump into the main quest; you're simply sent off only to find out things went awfully wrong and hordes of deformed humanoids are now out for blood. But as you drop into the first level, it's clear that you're the one spilling blood, carefully measured in gallons by the game itself, as you shred enemies with your shotgun, railgun, or machine gun.

The game nails its core gameplay loop: blast foes and scavenge to survive the next fight. The pace at which you dash, jump, and strafe makes you nimble, and each fight is a violent dance that ends once the last enemy is downed. It’s also possible to sprint past enemies to reach a level’s end or hop over a mob to avoid getting cornered and create space to fire back.

You’re given the choice of a primary weapon at the start of a run, and kiosks are scattered through the game which provide free randomized upgrades, some more effective than others. Depending on your play-style, the changes to your main weapon's primary and secondary fire can either be advantageous or a burden. The powerful grenade launcher upgrade for the shotgun, could be replaced by an inaccurate flak cannon. Barrels and explosive bugs can be used to your benefit, and additional weapons scatter the world, which are single-use and vary in effectiveness. While a rocket launcher or plasma rifle work well for hardened foes, a short range needle gun and sonic blaster aren't particularly useful in most situations. It's also disappointing that for a game that revolves around shooting, most of the guns lack impact; the machine gun and railgun feel downright piddly.

Mutated humans, turrets, spiders, and acid-tossing foes populate the world and require you to think fast and adapt to their respective, unique threats. The game isn't just about withstanding sheer numbers or fending off waves of enemies. In Strafe, one misstep could spell disaster for your run, since damage comes swiftly and in large chunks. Forgetting to check your flanks and watch your back, or being too close to explosive projectiles can be your undoing. This makes critical mistakes deep into a run incredibly dejecting, but by the same token, it's what creates the ever-increasing tension as you go further along. Like all rogue-style games, the threat of punishment is part of the enjoyment, but it induces a level of repetition that isn't always inviting.

The scarcity of the game’s two currencies compels you to scan your environment closely, where you'll find scrap for armor and ammo, and money for items at shops. You're never given too much of either, so part of the tension in survival is spending these two currencies wisely. While the onus is on you to figure out the best use-case for items and upgrades, as it isn't immediately clear what things do, such as the four primary weapon attribute pick-ups. However, experimentation and working with what you have is part of the fun.

As you mow down new enemies, a sense of wonder, excitement, and desperation is instilled by the infectious electronic rock track that you can't stop humming or get out of your head.

The more you experiment with Strafe, the more Easter eggs and secrets begin to reveal themselves. Jump into the first level without choosing a gun, and a wrench will be your primary weapon. Play the Wolfenstein 3D clone arcade machine or the imitation Game Boy and upgrades are spit out. One particular highlight was finding the Superhot shotgun; the game itself turns into Superhot where time only advances when you move, up until the weapon runs out of ammo. Easter eggs like this instill the desire to find more secrets and go beyond simply finishing the final level. Even after 12 hours, there's still more to discover.

Though the start and tail end of each level remains the same, large portions are procedurally generated, drawing from a handful of preset rooms rearranged in sequence and orientation. While this keeps you guessing to an extent with each run, familiarity eventually creeps in. A few later levels feature branching rooms as you search for power cells to open a door to advance, but you're more or less funneled in a certain direction through familiar layouts. If there's a fault here, it's that Strafe fails to introduce truly unexpected challenges. Thankfully, the game's redeeming qualities are enough to keep you hooked.

And one of the strongest hooks is the soundtrack. Sometimes, the urge to hop into the game just to listen to these songs hits, as if you ordered music with a side of gameplay. Level 3-2 is a dark and haunting place with music to match. The blaring synth melody over a catchy bassline coalesce with the up-tempo beat and industrial percussion that makes for a song that's grimy, horrifying, and inspiring all at the same time. Level 2-1 is your first encounter with open air to relieve the claustrophobia of the first levels. As you mow down new enemies, a sense of wonder, excitement, and desperation is instilled by the infectious electronic rock track that you can't stop humming or get out of your head. Moments of chaos are bookended with the tranquil, ethereal tracks in each exit room and shop. The music never loses its grip and never disappoints, and it becomes part of Strafe's personality, adding a significant layer of enjoyment.

While the first levels of Icarus feel pulled straight from the original Doom with its tight corridors and dim lighting, you begin to see subsequent levels open up and tie together. The lo-fi retro aesthetic is colorful and clean, which makes for both silly and terrifying enemies that splatter excessive gore and literally paint the town red. Any semblance of story is told from environment alone, and it's one of the aspects that make the game alluring. From the shop owners and scientists to the posters and laboratory vats, a typical story of experimentation gone wrong emerges, but only if you pay close attention to your surroundings. It results in quirky and varied set pieces for frantic shooting, and it's enough to lead you along to the satisfying conclusion.

The lo-fi retro aesthetic is colorful and clean, which makes for both silly and terrifying enemies that splatter excessive gore and literally paint the town red.

However, the game isn't without its technical issues. Enemies occasionally shoot at you through walls, most apparent in level 3-1, where those with projectile weapons gathered behind a locked door. Occasionally, an actual enemy character model would glitch out and zip across a room and disappear entirely or sneak up behind you to cause unfair damage. Later levels had a few inexplicable frame drops, given the modest system requirements. Thankfully, these issues are rare enough as to not entirely ruin an otherwise refined experience.

As unforgiving, repetitive, and frustrating as it can be, the urge to jump back into the game and take out that frustration on hordes of enemies to the tune of the most-proper soundtrack with a toy box of guns is hard to resist. Strafe wears its influences on its sleeve but stands on its own as a fun, intense, and fast-paced shooter with distinguishable charm.

The Good

• Infectious electronic soundtrack that exudes charisma
• Shooting and movement coalesce perfectly
• Elegant, yet gruesome retro presentation and aesthetic
• Roguelike structure makes for thrilling runs, especially late-game
• Weapon variability and item system mixes up play-style

The Bad

• Becomes repetitive after a while
• Technical issues, like enemies shooting through walls, can ruin a run
• Many guns lack impact

8
Great

 

[Raapys]

I just read the title and thought this was gonna be a Strife remake. Very sad.

 

[Belegarsson]

My impression after the first hour

- Why does this game has reload mechanic? What kind of old school shooter has reload? Why is gun clip's size so small? Shotgun and railgun can only shoot 5 rounds before reloading.

- Music is great but gun sound is eh.

- Bullet impact is piiful.

- Gore is okay, enemy's animation is kinda clunky tho.

- Levels: I haven't played much, still wandering in Icarus so take this with a grain of salt - levels themselves are handcrafted but they feel... empty, I don't know how to describe them but they feel very plain and isn't very interesting to traverse.

- Despite this ^, character movement is great, bunny hopping is incredibly fun.

- You can jump into Icarus without a weapon, the game will now give you a wrench and you can blast through the level without gun (extremely difficult though and melee isn't that satisfying).

A half of me is telling me to refund, the other half wants to play more to see if the game gets better in the next 3 areas

 

[Boleskine]

 

[skacky]

It's really quite bad. Level design is awful, monster design is abysmal and gunplay is bland and boring. All the monsters I've seen so far just run towards you like braindead morons, even the ones with ranged attacks. They take zero advantage of the environment like height differences or interconnection, which is a result of both their bad AI and the bad level design. You have monsters that lay in ambush in plain sight and don't even react when they get shot at. The game just likes to have a succession of poorly-textured bland rooms with relatively low-poly architecture (even compared to 1996 shooters) with as many monsters thrown in as possible. There is no monster synergy and zero thought in monster placement. Most of the monster closets have more than lackluster results because they're either poorly placed or don't have the right enemies in them. Weapons are dull and sound is dull. There is a ton of gore but what's the point when all the weapons sound like they're made of paper? Headbobbing is also vomit-inducing.

There are ways to improve on the monster design while keeping the mindless hordish aspect and the bad level design: make the basic goons jump off ledges when the player is below them instead of running towards the nearest staircase so they can get slaughtered in line in a doorway and have accompanying ranged enemies STAY THE FUCK WHERE THEY ARE instead of running towards you as well so they can take potshots while the melee monsters jump on your head to punch you. Have the crawling monsters that lie in ambush on the ceilings move around when they see you instead of standing still, and have them jump around a lot instead of crawling pitifully slowly on the ground.

Best FPS of 1996 my ass. You can't say that with a straight face with a Wolf3D-tier level design and a worse AI than Quake. This is just a meme game surfing on the 90s shooter vibe but it doesn't understand what made them good in the first place.

EDIT: for what it's worth, the game gets a little better as you progress. Level and monster designs are still bad but visual fidelity drastically increases so maps are not eyesores anymore.

 

[soulburner]

Ah, people forgot how to make classic FPS games. The veterans (are there any left, by the way?) don't remember, younger developers don't get it...

 

[Roderick]

Ah, people forgot how to make classic FPS games. The veterans (are there any left, by the way?) don't remember, younger developers don't get it...

The Veterans seem to work on Doom maps and mods.

I still want to try Strafe

 

[Gepeu]

Ah, people forgot how to make classic FPS games. The veterans (are there any left, by the way?) don't remember, younger developers don't get it...

The game's clueless from what I've seen.

 

[Astral Rag]

system:
7700k
GTX 1080
16GB DDR4

​

Yeah, it's a Unity game.

 

[orcinator]

Played it for a bit.


Yeah the "level design" sure sucks a fat one. You got rooms that look like they belong in a classic shooter, you got the ambush spots, and spots for extra ammo or secrets but the levels are completely devoid of any attempts at enemy placement beyond "put X space vampires in the middle" and the game tries to be some sort of hardcore roguelike and keeps items scarce so you're not gonna find anything most of the time. Shit, Binding of Issac managed to rooms where the enemies are actually arranged to fulfill some sort of purpose, but given how the rest of the game is chock full of bad design decisions like how you can only collect ammo for one of three weapons, which you can't even replace, only modify, it's not surprising it's outdone by a flash game.


Maybe it gets less awful after the first zone, but from what I heard that's not the case.