REVIEW – We don’t need Unreal Engine 4! Let’s go back to 1996! That’s what Pixel Titans thought. Their game was picked up by Devolver, and it showed up as a gray title amongst modern technical masterpieces due to its older visuals and gameplay. It looks good.

Shotgun. Machine gun. Railgun. A bit of unintentional timing: after the shock of playing Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 (I never asked for this, let’s put it that way…), I tried to make myself come alive with the PS1 port of Quake II. After that, playing STRAFE didn’t feel much difference, as id Software’s (or, technically, Hammerhead’s) work still kept that classic vibe at the end of the 1990s.

– doom –

Feeling the past is nice. Last year, DOOM tried to go retro, and it succeeded, albeit its graphics – powered by the id Tech 6 engine – was as modern and technically impressive as it could be. However, STRAFE went back to 1996 even with its visuals. This is when I’m shot (as well as my left arm, which nobody cares about): how to judge the visuals? Let’s just say that it is fine. When the game intentionally wants to stay down to Earth, you don’t go and kick it. You can’t judge it otherwise.

The Icarus space station with its procedurally generated levels nods towards No Man’s Sky, and then it provided exciting moments, such as… reloading. Yeah, the reloading is key, you have to time it not to die. I’m already the type of guy that always tries to have reloading done as soon as possible, and it made me play held back and careful to not die over and over because of badly timed reloading. Then, the bloodshed came. Actual bloodshed. A lot of gore around the maps, while having myself look for secrets, which can be traced back as early as Wolfenstein 3D… it felt good.

– quake –

The rainstorm in the sunny summer weather is the quality of the artificial intelligence. It runs the ambiance when you see an alien stop in one spot or just mindlessly run around. Ah, but there are a lot of them! Making up quality by quantity is not always the smartest idea, but thankfully, you can get rid of them via natural accidents… namely, the acid. Use it and abuse it.

An obligatory turn towards the weapons: you can tune these with scrap metal, and you can also make yourself some shield in some benches, and let’s be frank, you are going to need them. STRAFE is not easy, which, going by its name, requires you to strafe around and jump, while being fast-paced, to succeed. And yet, would I name the difficulty a negative? Well, I’ll be honest, I had to stop and think about it. The game wants to be old, and back in 1996, developers have released almost frustratingly difficult games. Case in point, Crash Bandicoot, which needed a lot of skill to get it 100% complete, and imagine if it had that cut level included as well… so let’s put it this way: in the case of STRAFE, the difficulty is understandable. In the past two decades, games have become quite easy with a lot of checkpoints and automatic saving, just to get more people to play said title. We didn’t have much of that in 1996, now did we?

– wolf –

STRAFE also has some online for you. SPEED ZONE is for those with speed in mind: beat the fastest time to win. MURDER ZONE for those who like horde modes with ten (I think?) waves of enemies. STRAFE ZONE with weekly updated challenges. With these, the game’s life expands out as much as even 20-22 hours, so after beating the game (and no, no ending linked this time, because then I’d get five paragraphs of complaining about that), you’ll still find life in STRAFE, which does have a problem in my opinion aside from the AI: the level designs. Ugh. (At least the soundtrack is very nice!)

So here’s a game, which I quote, „is for a niche audience,” which you can get for a third of a price of a recent AAA game like Sniper Ghost Warrior 3, and if I didn’t have to write about it, I’d still have given STRAFE a 7.5. If only the AI, the levels were more polished, then it’d have received an 8.

One painful question remains, though: if you go for an old school gameplay, WHY DO YOU HAVE RELOADING? (That’s why I docked 5% off the score, to be fair.)

-V-

Publisher: Devolver Digital

Developer: Pixel Titans

Genre: Retro FPS

Release date: May 9, 2017