![]() ![]() The goons that are the bulk of the enemies are melee-only, but they move quietly so it’s easy to get taken by surprise. It’s easy to think your back is safe only to get a rude shock as your shields and health start unexpectedly cratering. Strafe is randomized, but it’s randomized from hand-built pieces, and these can be fairly intricate. This is easier said than done, though, because the level design can get fairly ornate. The trick, then, is to manage the horde, picking off a few from a distance while knowing that your butt is covered. The enemies stand around staring, waiting to be activated by your presence, but when whole room comes to life at once it can be hard to pump out enough firepower to stem the tide. Spraying down a hallway with a hail of machinegun bullets seems like the best way to go but it doesn’t pack the punch of the other two guns in the armament, which is a serious problem when the halls of the Icarus get crammed with goons and gun-bots in full aggro mode. The machine gun is probably the hardest weapon to use effectively, shotgun is a nice middle ground, and railgun is as close to Easy mode as Strafe gets. Strafe is hard but beatable, but getting good enough to reach the ending is going to take more than a few runs to polish your skills.Īt the start of a run you get to choose from one of three weapons. Survive as long as possible and maybe, with a bit of practice and good luck with the gun mods, you’ll see the ending. Kills things, don’t die, collect scrap and cash along the way, and spend resources on shields, ammo, and other helpful goodies. You’re a scrapper on the doomed freighter Icarus taking a long trip outside of civilized space, and the ship is overrun with pasty goons ready to gnaw the meat off your bones. The FMV clips in the tutorial are a great touch, and its throwback art style a lot of fun, but Strafe is a modern game through and through and a great, bloody time when its parts work together properly. ![]() Everything surrounding the game itself is as 90s (and sometimes late 80s) as possible, but it’s heart is more a product of present-day gaming like Tower of Guns, Immortal Redneck, Heavy Bullets, Fancy Skulls, Ziggurat or anything else from that genre than Quake. ![]() Strafe is a purely modern roguelike action FPS decked out in a 90s low-poly, chunky textured skin. This gave rise to the roguelike FPS, which focuses more on fast action than tactical thinking, and that brings us full circle to Strafe. In the last several years, though, a combination of genres hit, with roguelike elements rising to the fore thanks to games like Binding of Isaac and smaller-budget titles masking the lack of AAA-funding by using retro-styled art. Then everything got all serious for a few decades and it seemed like the arcade-action FPS was dead. Doom had set the PC world on fire with its action, and while Quake couldn’t pack the body-count into the levels due to hardware limitations, it was still truly stunning tech for the time. The 90s were an interesting time in gaming, in that 3D was coming into its own but still a long way from maturity. ![]()
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