STRAFE: Gold Edition

The short version is that this game is enjoyable, although somewhat repetitive and not in the same category as 90's shooters. What it does right: The procedural generation is done well, the rooms are well laid out and clearly designed with some thought rather than just shoved together. The monsters seem well balanced and the difficulty definitely ramps up with each new zone, although it is a bit more of a spike than you would expect. The weapons feel powerful and the weapon mods are fun. The other game modes are really enjoyable, especially if you have 30 minutes you just want to go shoot at stuff with. It is really apparent that they put a lot of work into the game and it is a fun experience....BUT.... It is not a mashup of any 90's shooters. Shooters from the 90s did not include things like procedural generation, limited weapon options, random/few available weapon modifications, no ammo pickups except for your main weapon, nearly no health items, no saving, and repetitive zones. The only thing this game has in common with shooters of that era is arguably the difficulty and the fast paced movement/controls, it shares almost no mechanics with them. Does it improve on that formula? Maybe this is more of a criticism of procgen in shooters, but I find it really annoying and repetitive to have to go through the same zone every time you die. There are ways around this, but you end up with a weaker build starting in a more difficult zone. In the hours I've played this, I found I spent almost half my time in the first 3 or 4 zones, which got old really fast. I also don't get the replayability argument, we've had the same Doom maps for over 20 years and we keep replaying them because they were designed well. In all, it's an enjoyable game, but probably one that'll get 10 hours max from me. The shooting is fun and engaging, but the repetitive environments are what does it in for me. I also found the difficulty to be artificial due to limited health/ammo pickups.

First off, is this game worth full price? Well, if you are looking for that pure 90's fast paced first person shooter then answer is No. Get brutal doom instead. On the other hand if you have grown up with autogenerating health and autoaim, this might good starting point to get the feel for what it was all about in the 90's. Fast paced action, quick reflexes and no mercy. The procedurally generated levels get tiresome quite fast. They are boring and nothing about them feels unique. I feel handcrafted and well thought out static levels would have been a better choice. Why not have both methods used even? In the end you start wondering if the developers were even born in the 90's. Bullet spread, really?

There are worse games out there than Strafe® and the core gameplay actually is a not bad. It has a few problems though, of which IMO by far the biggest one is a lack of variety. I played it for around 2 hours so far and it already got repetitive to a point where i don't really feel the need to play it again for a while. The reason behind that is mostly the weapon system. At the start of each run you choose between 3 main weapons (Shotgun, machine gun and railgun) and for the majority of your run you're stuck with that weapon, because every weapon you will find during a run has a very limited amount of ammo (one clip with no possibility of getting more). That means you use them for maybe 10-20 seconds and you're back to your standart weapon. That way it simply feels like pretty much every run is the same. At least for the first 2 floors. It is also kind of insulting that only the steam version of the game has achievements, as they are - at least for me - another factor for replayability. One could think it would be reasonable to put the same amount of work into the GOG (Good OLD games) version of a game, if your target audience is people who like 90's oldschool shooters.

Ok, rather than a review, I'm going to point out my my issues with STRAFE, since I do recommend it, it's a fun game, but think that I could use with some improvements. Bear in mind, these are very early impressions. The thing that most people will wonder about are the randomly generated levels, which are passable, at least for what I played. They are no DooM, but they do the job. My main gripe is the way that weapons are handled, and I don't mean the feel of them (yeah, they feel floaty and aren't the punchiest weapons you'll find in an fps, but they are better than weapons in some other roguelite fps, such as Paranutical Activity, Ziggurat and Tower of Guns), but rather the primary and secondary weapon system. The game allows you to pick a primary weapon (rifle, shotgun or railgun) at the start of a run, and while playing you may upgrade it (case in point, I had the railgun and upgraded it to some sort of disc-gun). My main issue comes with the secondary weapons. During my short playtime, I found about 4 of them, so the game has weapon variety, but the problem is that you can't get ammo for these, and once depleted, they are thrown away. This means that you'll end going back to your primary weapon, seriously limiting the variety in combat. Another thing that might annoy some, is the reload system. When you reload and you still have some ammo on your clip, you'll lose it, and if you happen to try to use the secondary fire which might need more ammo than you have on your clip, then you will automatically reload and lose the ammo on the clip. Also, difficulty might be too much in the early levels, but I feel it's unfair to complain about this given my crappy old computer runs the game at a terrible fps which made everything harder. I will complain about the scarcity of healing items though. As I said, despite this issues, the game is still fun, so don't discard it, just keep your hype in check. And kudos to the devs, I wish them the best of luck with this game.