It took me seven to escape from the Icarus for the first time. To put its difficulty into perspective, a clean run through of Strafe would take you roughly two hours. The first stage throws wrench-wielding madmen and plasma-spitting spiderbots at you in their dozens, while health and armour are alarmingly sparse. As well as being an FPS, Strafe is also a roguelike, and it is a fearsome one at that. But I wonder how many people will reach them. The later levels are particularly enjoyable to explore. Strafe even manages to incorporate traps into its procedural levels, where picking up a keycard will trigger a bunch of walls to open up back along the route you came, spilling more enemies into the level. Its structured as a guided tour through FPS history, referencing everything from Duke Nukem to Half Life.
Commencing inside the Icarus, whose narrow corridors and brick-like elevators evoke memories of Doom, Strafe busts out into terrifying alien gorges with glowing acid lakes, and a subterranean research facility connected by its own underground railway. While each level is randomly assembled, it doesn't look like it. Its blocky environments and lumpen enemies are rendered in bright and bold colours, and subtly infused with more modern technologies, such as ragdoll physics and Strafe's unique UBER-GORE system, which paints the environments in levels of blood and giblets that would have caused even the most trick of Intel 486 PCs to violently implode.Īlmost as impressive are Strafe's procedural generation algorithms.
Strafe's crowning achievement is how it transforms technical limitation into a distinct style. From the moment you teleport into the in the belly of the decrepit Starship Icarus, Strafe is a straightforward, relentless bloodbath. There is a more specific backstory than this, but in true mid-90s fashion the developers don't particularly care about explaining it. Strafe has you don the helmet of a nondescript soldier-slash-explorer fellow (or fellette, Strafe lets you select gender) travelling through some dark corner of uninhabited space. But none of its innovations or achievements can make up for the fact that it gets the guns wrong.īefore I slice my chainsaw through Strafe's pulsating jugular, let's talk about what it does right, because a lot of love has gone into this game, and I want to like it more than I do. Meanwhile, it underpins this aesthetic with a more modern structure, featuring procedurally generated levels and brutally unforgiving permadeath. From its tongue-in-cheek tutorial to its fountains of gore, Strafe presents a convincing facsimile of a golden-age FPS. Despite their lack of weaponry, these goggle-eyed wrench-monkeys are more dangerous than they look. So I went back, and undertook a crash-course in the formation of the first-person shooter, 1993 to 1998. The sensation was so unsettling that I had to check I wasn't misremembering my own misspent youth turning big brown polygons into smaller red polygons. This is exactly what I did while playing through Strafe, because from the moment I entered Pixel Titans' procedurally generated love-letter to 1996, my hands and my brain were telling me something wasn't right. It's why whatever else they did right or wrong, you can go back to any of them today and still have a great time from the first shot onwards.
Doom's shotgun, Quake's Nailgun, Half Life's revolver, each of them is a masterclass in audio/visual feedback, a bucking, roaring, arm-juddering bringer of death.
Go back to any of the classic shooters of the mid-90s, and you will find that no matter how badly the graphics have aged, how weird their control schemes are, the weapons they place in your pixelated hands feel absolutely fantastic. But like all these other hallmark elements of FPS design, it isn't as fundamental as ensuring that your guns are fun to fire. Is it fast movement? Again, that won't hurt your chances. Is it smart level design? That can certainly make your shooter interesting and memorable, but it isn't a prerequisite to enjoyment. What's the most important component of a good FPS? Is it violence? No. A gleefully gory throwback to 90s shooters wrapped in a rogue-like shell, Strafe is let down by uneven pacing and underwhelming guns.
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