Strafe Review

Do you ever wish that you could play a face paced first person shooter like the original Doom games while it also made in this decade, then I would recommend Doom 2016. But if that’s too expensive for your blood, then I would recommend Strafe.

Strafe is a fast paced first person shooter in the vein of games like Doom and Quake, but it also includes some rogue-lite elements. It was developed by Pixel Titans and published by Devolver Digital.

Strafe started its life as a Kickstarter campaign with a goal of $185,000 and ended up raising around $207,000. Strafe was then in development for 2 years and was released on Steam and PS4 on May 9, 2017 and then gaining Linux support on March 28, 2018.

You play as a scraper aboard the Icarus scavenging valuable garbage on the edge of the galaxy.

You leave to Icarus to go collect some scrap, but when you return, you find that the Icarus has vanished, but your teleporter still has a connection, so you teleport on with the intent of discovering what has happened.

Strafe is a fast paced first person shooter that wears its inspiration from games such as Doom and Quake right on its sleeve and shamelessly waves it in your face any chance it gets.

The most important part of any fast paced fps is the weapons, which there are a fair amount of. You start by picking one of three guns; shotgun, machine gun, or a rail gun. These weapons can be upgraded to have a secondary fire mode by robots who you can find around the levels.

While in the level, you’re also able to pick up around 13 other guns, but the only way to get ammo for the guns you pick up is to pick up identical guns. You’ll also be able to break open crates and find perks that will increase things like damage, clip size, and fire rate.

If you run out of ammo for the weapons you find in the level, you’ll automatically turn the gun around and bash the next enemy you see over the head with it, but this also breaks the weapon and you lose it.

The art style is rather interesting. Pixel Titans decided that, to best capture the 1996-esque look they were going for, they wanted to make the game look low poly. I think this style was well accomplished and a good choice.

The music is good, but isn’t as energetic as one might expect it to be considering what kind of game Strafe is. It can also get repetitive and grating.

There are some rogue-lite elements. The levels are randomly generated every time, there is perma-death, and there is also a meta-game in the form of coins.

These coins that you unlock through some unexplained form of progress are used to unlock features for the game. Things like Big Head Mode, Rocket Arena, and Roleplaying Game.

While coins are used in the meta-game, there are two currencies which you can accumulate during each run. These are scrap and credits.

Scrap can be used to purchase ammo and shields from conversion machines. Scrap can also be exchanged for credits. Credits are used to purchase non-permanent items from the merchant that you can find every couple of levels.

I had a fair amount of issues with Strafe, ranging from large issues to what probably amount to nit picking.

The enemies all look like they’re from the original System Shock.  understand that they most likely pulled inspiration from System Shock, but there’s a difference between pulling inspiration and pulling enemies wholesale without adding anything of your own.

The game doesn’t let you automatically reload when you empty your weapon’s clip. You have to actively hit the R button or click to reload. This can ruin the flow of combat, especially when you’re not paying attention to the ammo count during a firefight.

The randomly generated levels can occasionally be a pain to navigate. Since everything is just a shade of grey or brown, it can be difficult to find some of the more narrow halls that you have to find to get to the next area.

Also along the lines of the navigation, attempting to use the map is like having a death wish. Your entire screen moves to the bottom right corner of your helmet so that you are no longer able to see anything except the map.

The map can also not even be helpful to find your way around. If there is a floor or something above you, it will completely block everything you might want to see around you like door you can’t find because everything looks the same.

The fall damage is also a ridiculous thing. I understand having some fall damage in the game,it’s obviously going to hurt if you fall of something tall. But the amount of fall damage you take from dropping only around 5 feet is silly.

It’s especially silly when you remember that movement is an important part of this game and dropping to a lower level may be your only way of not getting cornered by a horde of enemies.

My last issue is a simple one, but it gets to be infuriating over time. When you die, you get the option to either continue or quick restart. If you earn a coin and want to spend it, you have to go back to the starting area, which you can’t do if you quick restart.

So if you hit continue so that you can go spend your newly earned coin, it sends you back to the main menu for the game where you have to reenter the game proper just to spend your coin and get back to playing.

If a third option was added to return to the menu and allowing continue just to take you back to the starting area, then there would be no issue, but sadly that’s not the case.

But even with all these issues in consideration, I would say that I had some fun with the time I spent with Strafe. I don’t know if I would recommend it in its current state. Maybe wait until a couple more patches come out.