STRAFE is a game that has been plucked straight out of the 90’s. Everything about it is a call back to the golden shooters of the past. Games like DOOM Classic, Counter Strike Source, Quake, Tribes and Unreal Tournament are the obvious heavy influences that STRAFE presents. With its aesthetic, marketing, soundtrack, game-play and humor, the game truly does stand out above the competition by focusing on our nostalgia for the shooter genre.
However while the feeling of fun, technical and fast combat is prevalent throughout, many modern gaming mechanics in place, like rogue-like elements, make the game feel odd and disjointed at times, and weigh down the whole experience.
If somehow everyone got teleported back to 1996 and STRAFE was released, it would be the game you’d want to go over to your friends house to play all night but that your mom wouldn’t let you. Everything just feels very nostalgic for someone who grew up playing games in the 90’s and into the 2000’s like myself. Usually I’m not affected by any nostalgia for games, but STRAFE definitely struck a chord within me.
You play as a space scrapper whose job is to collect materials from an abandoned ship called the Icarus. The story is presented via an old-school FMV that emulates crappy VHS quality to a tee. After the intro you’re dropped into your ship, pick your gun, and then you’re on to the very first level.
STRAFE sets up a very distinct tone right when you kill your first enemy as the wonderful synth music kicks in to take over your senses. The low poly graphics are quite gorgeous and fun to look at. As the blood and guts spill in the gallons (the game counts this for you) you will find yourself hopping and speed boosting across the maps of the game. Everything feels fast and fluid, but it’s all weighed down by some very weird design choices. STRAFE does an amazing job of letting you experience it with minimal hand holding and explanations, all of it is fluid and to the point. If you’re a person like me who is starving for an arena shooter to play then I have the game for you, STRAFE feels right at home with the genre.
The game randomly generates a level every time you perish, so whenever you play it’s always a bit different — but ends up being very repetitious. The amount of randomization that I came across was very little, I probably saw the same layouts of rooms three times or more in my six plus hours of playtime. The first levels of STRAFE are almost in completely confined spaces, which make them harder for you to jump around and easier for the enemies to get at you. In turn the first three levels are ridiculously difficult in comparison to the rest of the game.
So many of the systems put into STRAFE hinder the players speed and movement options. The game has fall damage, so when you’re flying around at incredible speeds you can potentially fall to your death. It has many random weapon drops that you can find throughout but you can only have one clip in the gun at a time. In fact, you don’t really have a huge arsenal of guns at all and more so just one all the way through the game with a few co-stars . The biggest fault with STRAFE is its choice of having the character reload his gun and manage scrap at the same time, all of which is incredibly slow. Reloading isn’t inherently bad but within the systems it just brings everything to a screeching halt. It’s the same with the introduction of scrap. You collect scrap throughout the level and can find bins that let you create more ammo or armor. However, most of the time you can only create one, so help is few and far between.
For a game that seems to rest its laurels on the likes of classic Quake and DOOM, it relies heavily on the modern game play over the old. This seems to contradict the game’s choice of advertising calling itself “the best game of 1996.” It doesn’t feel like it belongs in that time period but more so like it belongs in a 2017 version of that period. While STRAFE can be repetitive and infuriating the overall experience is still one that I would recommend. It isn’t scared to show its influences on its sleeve and finds a way to have its own charm, letting it stand out in the sea of ‘rogue-like, crafting, shooter, survival’ type games that are flooding the marketplace today. But there is enough retro charm to get a fan like me interested for a long while.
This review is based on a code provided by developer Pixel Titan to SideQuesting.
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