The Best Game of 1996? Hardly....

I'll get this out of the way first. Yes I'm aware it's a roguelike. I have hundreds of hours in Binding of Isaac, Spelunky and many others. I can certainly enjoy a fantastic roguelike. I've even played some of the FPS roguelikes, but none truly appealed to me. Tower of Guns and Killing Room both failed in their offerings to me. I did like Ziggaurat however.

STRAFE seemed like it was aware of what was wrong with those games. Your game needs to be fast paced, good gun feedback and a wide variety of weapons to truly feel great. A FPS game needs to have good gun feedback to succeed. If it feels like you're shooting a pea shooter the entire game will feel like a grind. You also need a good amount of enemy variety. Oh and excellent level design never hurts.

Thankfully, STRAFE puts itself above all of its competitors and manages to nail none of these. The guns don't have a good feel, especially the assault rifle, but none of them feel very good. Especially when you're constantly going against hordes of mindless enemies. Enemies that will walk into walls, aggro through locked doors and do generally stupid things like walk directly into acid.

There are a selection of weapons you can pick up, but it doesn't appear as though you can ever reload them, only your primary. Also you cannot individually select weapons, you MUST use your scroll wheel which is obnoxious.

The game forces you to go slow with hazards that are often times really dumb. Actually, the best tactic in the game is to backwards, not strafe as the name implies. I'm guessing the developers knew this so they put enemies that spawn behind you which is never a fun mechanic. If the enemies had footsteps this wouldn't be a problem but no one is praising this game for having excellent game design.

Does the game have a wide variety of level pieces at least? It IS randomly generated after all? Well that's a great question. The answer is no. The game doesn't. You will see pieces repeating after a couple of playthroughs. Despite the textures being literally grey blocks for the first chapter (and then expanding to brown canyons in the second), they couldn't figure out how to make the level pieces not obvious. The game also has some really poorly designed bits of levels, such as having a "hidden" elevator that you can really only find if you memorize the texture for it. Adorable. It's not a secret, either. Just another sign of inept design.

But whatever. Congrats you got my $15 for this. A subpar roguelike advertised as being a 90s games purely based on the poor graphics rather than any mechanics or anything truly interesting from that generation. At least Devolver made some good trailers for it.

The Best Game of 1996? Hardly.... I'll get this out of the way first. Yes I'm aware it's a roguelike. I have hundreds of hours in Binding of Isaac, Spelunky and many others. I can certainly enjoy a fantastic roguelike. I've even played some of the FPS roguelikes, but none truly appealed to me. Tower of Guns and Killing Room both failed in their offerings to me. I did like Ziggaurat however. STRAFE seemed like it was aware of what was wrong with those games. Your game needs to be fast paced, good gun feedback and a wide variety of weapons to truly feel great. A FPS game needs to have good gun feedback to succeed. If it feels like you're shooting a pea shooter the entire game will feel like a grind. You also need a good amount of enemy variety. Oh and excellent level design never hurts. Thankfully, STRAFE puts itself above all of its competitors and manages to nail [b]none[/b] of these. The guns don't have a good feel, especially the assault rifle, but none of them feel very good. Especially when you're constantly going against hordes of mindless enemies. Enemies that will walk into walls, aggro through locked doors and do generally stupid things like walk directly into acid. There are a selection of weapons you can pick up, but it doesn't appear as though you can ever reload them, only your primary. Also you cannot individually select weapons, you MUST use your scroll wheel which is obnoxious. The game forces you to go slow with hazards that are often times really dumb. Actually, the best tactic in the game is to backwards, not strafe as the name implies. I'm guessing the developers knew this so they put enemies that spawn behind you which is never a fun mechanic. If the enemies had footsteps this wouldn't be a problem but no one is praising this game for having excellent game design. Does the game have a wide variety of level pieces at least? It IS randomly generated after all? Well that's a great question. The answer is no. The game doesn't. You will see pieces repeating after a couple of playthroughs. Despite the textures being literally grey blocks for the first chapter (and then expanding to brown canyons in the second), they couldn't figure out how to make the level pieces not obvious. The game also has some really poorly designed bits of levels, such as having a "hidden" elevator that you can really only find if you memorize the texture for it. Adorable. It's not a secret, either. Just another sign of inept design. But whatever. Congrats you got my $15 for this. A subpar roguelike advertised as being a 90s games purely based on the poor graphics rather than any mechanics or anything truly interesting from that generation. At least Devolver made some good trailers for it.