Not all's fair in this Quake-themed roguelike.
Strafe wants you to go fast. I felt it pushing me to blaze through its levels as quickly as I used to race through the original Quake in 1996, and I'd love nothing more than to oblige. And yet here I am, three stages in, carefully and methodically picking off charging Gluttons and waist-high robots who aim annoyingly well. I know now that death in Strafe comes far more easily than it ever did in id's landmark first-person shooter, and this is the first time in hours I've made it so far without taking much damage. I'm feeling good. And that's why I howl in rage when I take an elevator down and get instantly slaughtered by swarms of enemies from both behind and in front when I arrive at the bottom. I had no chance. Game over. Back to the beginning.
That's been my experience for much of Strafe. It bleeds '90s personality and nails so much about the early shooter experience while mixing it with today's craze for roguelike-style procedural generation and single-life runs, but too often it shoots itself in the foot with its unfair randomization, miserly access to armor and ammo boosts, and some lethal bugs.
It's easy to fall in love with Strafe early on, particularly if you're like me and remember when its rough, first-generation 3D graphical aesthetic looked like the cutting edge. Barely a minute goes by before I'm giggling at the scratchy VHS-like full-motion video tutorial featuring an actress in a dead-on '90s 'do explaining the controls with suggestive quips. Killing enemies makes them erupt in fountains of blood and guts (known as “gibs” if you’re over 30), allowing their mess to serve as a gruesome cookie-crumb trail should you get lost. Limbs sometimes fly off before foes die in a welcome nod to popular mods like Brutal Doom. At the end of each stage, you get a rundown crammed with old standby stats such as how many headshots you landed, but it also works in stuff like how many gallons of blood you supposedly spilled and makes snarky references to your cause of death.
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Most of the time, at least, the procedural generation works well.
And most of the time, at least, the procedural generation works well. No matter how many times I had to start over (and there were many, many times), each new playthrough unfolded wildly differently than the last. Sometimes I'd enter the Icarus spaceship that serves as the setting and find myself looking down a spiral staircase with gluttons rushing up toward me, while at other times I might find myself in wide-open rooms where zombie-like creatures cling to the walls like evil Spider-Men. In time, I saw it all so much that I grew to learn to spot where the pre-made pieces fit together, but never so well that rushing through was a breeze.
It helps that Strafe’s gunplay usually satisfies, even though the guns always feel like they would benefit from a bit more "oomph" or originality. You start off by choosing a permanent one – a shotgun, a laser gun, or a machine gun – but I had the most fun when picking up the rocket launchers, nail guns, pistols, and other firearms scattered about the entrail-splattered floors and emptying their limited ammo before switching back to the defaults.
The trouble began when I started to notice I was being led astray too often. For example, because of the ancient-looking art style and its intentionally blocky textures, sometimes it's hard to make out the elevating platforms from the surrounding walls, making me wonder for a bit if Strafe had created a level that's impossible to escape. Worse, one of the most important elements is a vending machine that lets you buy armor or extra ammo for piles of scrap dropped from enemies, and often these get placed right underneath acid-spewing turrets that are sometimes impossible to avoid. I’d have been fine with no vending machine at all, but putting them where I can see them but not reach them is just rubbing salt in the wound.
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Strafe makes it tough to scrape together enough scrap.
And there were times when I couldn't use them even when I could reach them. Whoever's running the show on the Icarus is an evil punk who charges outrageous prices for those armor and ammo boosts, to the point that I almost never had enough scrap to buy more when I needed it. Usually, I'd end up clearing most of the level and working my way back to the machines, and sometimes even then I wouldn't be able to scrape together enough scrap.
Maybe I wouldn’t be in such dire need of more health if Strafe played a little fairer. For instance, the way most enemies make no sound when they're charging mindlessly toward you in droves seems like a cheap shot. Not only do you not usually hear anything without a gun coming, but they can whack off most of your armor with just a couple of swipes of their pipes or whatever else they're carrying before you even know they’re there. And just like that, painstaking runs with careful maneuvering get ruined in seconds. Especially after Devil Daggers recently showed us just how important sound can be to threat awareness, it’s strange that this similarly old-school game didn’t follow suit. (It’s even more bizarre considering Strafe includes a Devil Daggers-themed power-up.)
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Decisions like this ruin the gameplay that Strafe seems to be aiming for.
I can't help but feel decisions like this ruin the gameplay that Strafe seems to be aiming for. Rather than running through levels as I would in Quake, the severe paranoia left me creeping through each level, sneakily luring enemies into chokepoints and sniping them from afar when I could. And sometimes even then I'd get stuck in seemingly no-win situations like the elevator one described above, where I'd end up in a rough spot and die no matter how many precautions I took. It took many hours just to clear the first of four zones – and I’ve yet to get further than the third. (But of course, this style of game is meant to be beaten only by the most practiced of players.) The randomization keeps the experience of restarting again and again fresh, yes, but somehow it's never quite so rewarding as learning the secrets of deliberately designed levels like you find in id’s old (or new, for that matter) shooters. As if these intentional design decisions weren't enough of a kick in the teeth, sometimes I'd have to restart because I got inexplicably (and inextricably) stuck on the geometry of enemy bodies or shot dead by an enemy firing straight through a locked door. At least it generally runs well otherwise (as you’d expect from a game that looks like it’s fresh out of the ‘90s) aside from some jittery framerates when taking the chutes to the next stages or choosing your weapons at the very beginning. Presumably, that’s due to the computer’s resources being taken up by generating the level you’re about to die in.
That doesn’t sound great, I know – but it's a measure of how well Strafe captures the mid-'90s shooter experience that I never grew tired of booting it up even after hours of repeated punishment. There's a lot of fun here in its randomized levels, and I believe all that it would take to turn it into something wonderful is reducing the price on its armor and ammo boosts to give you a fighting chance even when the deck is so thoroughly stacked against you. Survival would feel like it had a little more to do with skill and strategy than blind luck, and it'd do a better job of capturing that speedy Quake action. As it is, it demands almost immaculate gameplay to survive even the first few stages, to say nothing of the entire 12-stage game, and even then it takes a fair amount of luck to make it very far. Even Quake was never quite so unforgiving.
The Verdict
When it works, Strafe is a generally entertaining retro-styled shooter that mixes procedurally generated levels into an experience strongly reminiscent of Quake. It's a great concept that usually comes together, but between the quirks of randomization, powerful enemies that run almost completely silent, lethal bugs, and hefty costs for vital armor and ammo powerups, a lot of the time it feels as challenging as rolling the dice and coming up with double sixes.
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